daily practice: random acts of kindness

Quick story. At lunch with a colleague two weeks ago we talked about each of our "daily practices". By the end of our conversation I realized we employed different practices, but shared similar ideas of what we hoped to achieve through our respective activities.

For reference purposes, here's an article on the topic. And another. Whoops, still another.

I came to appreciate each of us employed a daily practice to help foster a state of mindfulness, among other goals. I know he's successful at it because I see the results each day.

A related quick story. Following the first anniversary of Citizen Agency, HorsePigCow author and marketing wunderkind Tara Hunt wrote a very insightful article on the so-called "gift economy" and the role of "gifting" in her business. It's worked very well for her, which makes me happy.

I read her article the same day that I had my "daily practice" lunch. And two pieces suddenly connected.

A daily practice grounded in this concept of "gifting" would be committing random acts of joy and kindness. Unexpected by their recipients and dispensed without craft or prejudice, this is a profoundly disruptive and visible daily practice. No sitting zazen here - you must be in the world to play this game.

All you'd have to do is stop worrying about what people think of you. And so we discover the rate limiting step - being joyfully whimsical and kind is not so very far away from being foolish, in the classic (and best) sense. Are you prepared to look foolish? To be foolish?


Would you need to emulate Hotei, or perhaps the character found in the tenth Ox Herding Picture, to make this a reality?

Not sure. Stepping out over the cliff in the belief that good will come of good is a one-way trip.

It's been a long day - good night.

music: witchi tai to

Scene: Dewey's in Madison, NJ
When: Summer, 2006

"Dan, what's that song?"

"Oh, that's Witchi Tai To by Everything is Everything."

"It's been playing for the last half an hour."

"That's because I have it in a loop."

"Nice."

"Someday you'll want to find a copy. You'll know when."

Well, kids, someday arrived this morning.

Through the magic of Amazon, you can buy a copy Jim Pepper and Everything is Everything's Witchi Tai To on the album Hard to Find 45s on CD, Volume 6: More 60s Classics. The song is track 19 - you can listen to a sample here.

"Bob, what the heck is he singing?"

Hmm. It might be useful to mention that it's a Native American chant?

Here's a phonetic translation:

Witchi Tai To gim-mie rah
Whoa ron-nee ka
Whoa ron-nee ka
Hey-ney hey-ney no wah

According to a group called. . . wait for it. . . Witchi-Tai-To:

The tune Witchi-Tai-To was written by the late jazz saxophonist, Jim Pepper, who was a native American of the Creek and Caw (Plains) tribes. It is based on a ritual peyote chant, and although Jim and his family have done the original chant at numerous pow-wows down through the generations, nobody in the family seems to know the exact translation of the Comanche lyrics. The English lines "water spirit feelin' springin' 'round my head, Makes me feel glad that I'm not dead..." capture the essence of the chant.

When you start looking for different versions of the song, you start turning up some very different interpretations.

Compare the Jim Pepper / Everything is Everything "original" (the video is a montage of disaster and drought footage):



To X-Press 2's take (there's also a remix of this on the GU Mixed Ultimate Edition [CD1]):



Dig a little further and you'll discover a version by Brewer & Shipley of "One Toke Over the Line" fame as well as no end of "soft jazz" versions. In a message from the past, "Tram" reports:

Hello! I've been collecting Jim Pepper music and versions of "Witchi Tai To" for some years. I know of 57 versions released on vinyl or CD; so far, I have 42, all but two on CD! FYI, Dave, the Topo D. Bil version (originally a 1970 U.K. single) can be found on "The Famous Charisma Box Set", a 4-CD compilation from the Charisma label.

Why the sudden interest?

Sometimes when you wake up really, really early and a thought pops into your head, it's best to listen to it.

UPDATE: X-Press did 7 versions of their Witchi Tai To track:

1. Witchi Tai To (Radio Edit)
2. Witchi Tai To (Full Length)
3. Witchi Tai To (M Factor Vocal Remix)
4. Witchi Tai To (M Factor Instrumental Remix)
5. Witchi Tai To (Spencer Parker Remix)
6. Witchi Tai To (2 Lone Swordsmen Remix)
7. Witchi Tai To (Diesel Remix)

operators: defining qualities

There comes a time in every product manager's career when he/she needs to look outside the product management craft if he/she's going to get through a particularly challenging time.

In my efforts to be a better product manager I've been learning more about what it means to be a good operator.

Actually, strike that. I've been learning about what it means to be a great operator. Good is for suckers.

1. Great operators are able to focus the organization on the main drivers of value.
2. Great operators are constantly simplifying processes - not for the sake of simplification, but because simple processes can be executed flawlessly and measured more easily.
3. Great operators feel a need to upgrade the organization's talent - they're always setting expectations, giving feedback, giving A-players key roles and opportunities to excel.
4. Great operators have a very strong execution ethic - they have the ability to focus and get things done with an eye toward revenue growth and market-share gain (as benched against the key comparables - our rate of revenue growth against theirs, year over year or quarter over quarter, whatever is most important).

Across the board the operators I spoke with all seemed to have the ability to be able to conceptualize where their business is and where it is going, then they have the wherewithal from an execution focus to get things done.

They told me the reason most operators fail is not that they didn't know what was important, but that they couldn't focus the organization to make sure the most important tasks actually got done.

Here's something telling I heard from one particularly interesting guy:

I recognize that good operators have a small knowing vs doing gap - the time that elapses between knowing that something needs to get done and doing something. Good operators teach an organization to narrow this gap - to see a problem and to act on it, and teaching everyone else in an organization to see issues when they come up and to take action on those issues.

I also figured out that great operators embody certain intangibles. I'll mix my insights with some quotes here:

• The ability to teach the organization to confront reality - "a lot of times you'll see people trying to talk themselves out of what's going on (we're losing share, we have a bad person) - great operators have an ability to confront this reality and do something about it."
• An ability to teach the organization to refuse to accept mediocrity - "if you can teach people not to accept mediocrity, this is a huge competitive advantage."
• An ability to prioritize - "I tell my team that I want to be world-class at metrics number 1, 2 and 3 - this takes a narrowing of our focus on a few core things because they are the things that create the most value."

After talking to a bunch of these folks, I've come to appreciate that there is no magic background for great operating people. They simply have a knack for doing things that make customer's lives better and make it easier for customers to do business with them.

sigh: q2 07 iphone activations (updated)

In a New York Times article "AT&T Earnings Up, but iPhone Sales Disappoint" published today, Laurie Flynn reported:

AT&T said it signed up 146,000 iPhone customers, well below analyst estimates, which ran as high as 500,000 units. Shares of Apple fell more than 6 percent, closing at $134.89, down $8.81 on the day. AT&T’s shares were off less than 1 percent, closing at $39.68, a decline of 35 cents.

From briefing.com (via Digg):

[Today saw] the biggest one-day drubbing in Apple shares in seven years. AT&T said that only 146,000 iPhone subscribers were activated in Q2, which was viewed as a huge disappointment and caused collateral damage in Apple to the tune of a 6.1% sell-off in AAPL shares.

You don't have to rub your Magic 8-Ball too hard to come up with the following to explain low activation numbers:

1. The iPhone launched on June 29, 2007. 30 days hath September, April, June and November. . . telling me that consumers had at best 48 hours to purchase their phones and activate them in order to have those activations count in Q2. I'm guessing that the time between the actual launch (first possible activation) and the official close of the quarter (last possible completed activation, not counting those in the activation queue) was only about 30 hours. This translates to 4866 activations per hour / 81 per minutes / a little more than one per second on average. I'll also posit that the distribution of activations was more heavily weighted towards the back end of those 30 hours to take into consideration the time it took consumers to get home, have a delicious beverage, shower and start the activation process.

2. Stories of consumers experiencing severe delays activating their phones were widespread immediately following the launch. Half of the consumers in an Engadget.com poll reported activation delays, some as long as 60 hours.

3. Not all of those consumers who purchased phones in Q2 actually activated those phones in Q2.

4. Add in time to transfer a phone number, and your window of activation opportunity closes even tighter.

So why the hit on AAPL stock? Especially when Ms. Flynn reported that "a bright spot in the iPhone numbers during the quarter was that roughly 40 percent of the iPhone subscribers were new AT&T customers"?

Were analyst estimates grounded in practical reality? Or perhaps there are people who don't want a $600 phone on a slow, spotty 2G network with a 2-year required commitment to be successful? Or was this a reaction to numbers that didn't jibe with what common sense suggested?

UPDATE (7.25.07) - As expected, Apple reported actual iPhone sales which were more in-line with what they claimed analyst expectations to be, actually surpassing them.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the product's first two days, the last two days of the quarter, beating most analysts' estimates of 200,000. The enthusiasm for Apple's first mobile phone gave Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs an early victory in his plan to win a share of the market, which is almost four times bigger than the personal-computer industry. (source: Bloomberg)

Let's do a little math, shall we: Of the 270,000 iPhones sold in the first two days, only 146,000 were activated, or 54%.

It will be difficult to tell how many of those should have been activated in the first two days, but could not be due to system errors.

poll: what classic movie are you?

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

hobby: amber fan fiction

When I say that I've written Amber fan fiction on and off for the last thirteen years, I do so with equal measures of pride and alarm. Most of my so-called "work" is lost, buried in dead hard disks at the bottom of landfills or deep down in off-line archives. But sometimes I turn up treasures; at least I think they're treasures.

---

Christophe stared up at the ceiling of his study and prayed for death.

"Darling, I am praying for death," he announced to his wife seated a few feet away.

The syncopated rattle of her needles did not falter. "Is that so."

"Yes, truly. In fairness, I think I will draw on the example of one of the more quaint Begman customs and set fire to my home as my final expression of ennui."

"Do take care to let the cat out. I have my weekly card game down at Madame Zool's this evening, perhaps that would be a good time for you to express yourself."

"Or," Christophe offered, a sudden enthusiasm intruding into his voice, "I could throw myself from the window. I think there is a more or less clear path to the pavement."

"You will just suspend yourself on the crenelations and require rescuing by the Guard."

"Damn, right you are. What if I got a bit of a run-up, and jumped?"

"Impossible. All of our windows are too small. Why not just ask Mr. Zhou to slit your throat, or poison you? I hear his people are rather good at such mischief."

Christophe sniffed dismissively. "Zhou has lost his taste for such things. Too many years in the valet business takes the edge off a man, you know. Besides, it would look rather awkward for my murderer to assist in the burial. Can't have you bothering with all that mess, can I."

His wife put down her needles and smiled wanly. "My dear, that is sweet of you."

"It's the least I can do, the very least," Christophe continued, folding his fingers together across his velvet vest. "It would be rather hard on Pickering, though."

"Yes, it would. He's not in the best of health, and he is so fond of you, you know."

"Yes, quite. Good man, Pickering. The Colonel and I have had our share of scraps. I dare say he would take the news of my death rather hard."

"Especially if the circumstances were less than interesting."

Christophe climbed out of his overstuffed armchair and crossed his study to the window. The steady grey rain which defined the typical Begman day clung to the slate rooftops below, their chaotic steeples looking like a huge half-collapsed house of cards. Beyond them lay the green expanse of the Great Promenade; further beyond, the massive profile of the Chancery and Saint Kleist's Cathedral were dimly visible through the fog.

"It's been too long since we've been back to Amber," he said, tugging absently on the golden tasseled fringe of the curtain.

"Too long," replied his wife. Her needles were silent.

"I asked for the privilege to serve the Crown directly," growled Christophe. "When we were recalled from Anglia, it seemed a sensible request. I had no idea. . ."

"I know you expected to be posted in Amber, dear."

"Bleys had suggested as much," admitted Christophe with a sigh. "But then to be put under that scabby fossil Julius Limm. . . as ghastly a creature as I've ever known. . . I expected more, especially given Bleys' clear representations. . ."

His wife could not reply. The argument was, as it always was, one-sided; a paean of regret and bitter disappointment. It was all she could do to wait until the mood passed.

The clock chimed the hour; Mr. Zhou, wrapped in his royal blue silk housecoat and bearing a silver tray with the afternoon's first cup of tea, glided into the office. On the tray was a bit of folded parchment, sealed in wax.

"Zhou," offered Christophe, suddenly animated, "did you know I was praying for death?"

"Sir, of course, sir. There is a letter from the Kashfan ambassador," Mr. Zhou replied softly.

Christophe lifted the slim note from the tray, snapped the wax, scanned the letter once, then twice.

Then he crumbled it in his hands, a gleeful smile spreading across his normally sour countenance.

"Zhou, pack our bags. We are going to Amber."

innovation: man-eating badgers

British blamed for Basra badgers

BBC NEWS: 2007/07/12 13:00:42 GMT
(link)



British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

"We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don't attack humans unless cornered."

The director of Basra's veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals' corpses.

He told the AFP news agency: "These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.

"Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."

Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of Basra's veterinary college, speculated that the badgers were being driven towards the city because of flooding in marshland north of Basra.

But the assurances did little to convince some members of the public.

One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept.

"My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

doubt: google's mobile push (round 1)

No one debates that ads are good business. As a user of numerous free Google services funded (no doubt) by ad revenue, I'm hardly in a position to call foul on ads.

That Google can develop a suite of powerful mobile applications is not in doubt.

That Google wants to make those applications available to mobile phone consumers is also not in doubt.

That Google expects to generate ad revenue from serving ads to those individuals is most certainly not in doubt.

But what I doubt is the willingness of individuals to put up with ads on their mobile phones.

In today's New York Times article "Google Pushes for Rules to Aid Wireless Plans", Miguel Helft and Stephen Labaton report that

Google believes that the cost of voice calls and data connections to the Internet may be partly subsidized by advertisements brought to users by Google’s powerful online advertising machine.

Even pea-brained me can see where Google is going with this idea, and I'm not entirely sure pea-brained me likes it.

Let's say Google can buy spectrum and offers free or near-free access to users who buy their phones off the shelf. The cost of mobile to the rest of us who don't want to stare at ads before we hit the SEND button is going to skyrocket. After all, who pays for the cell towers, the call centers, the rest of the infrastructure that keeps our mobile communications network working? The mobile companies are going to have to make up for all of those users they're losing.

Or am I willing to spend $500 on a phone because I don't get a subsidy from the phone company?

Or am I willing to put up with the quality hassles that come from n-number of phone companies trying to make sure their services work with m-number of handsets when they have no idea which handsets their consumers want to use?

Or am I willing to put up with the fun that happen when all that "free software" Google wants to load on my phone - for free - fails to play together nicely? It is "free" after all. You pays your money, you takes your chances. It's one thing if your GMail email doesn't go through, or if your Blogger account suddenly goes dark. It's entirely another if you can't count on your mobile phone.

What I'm reading here is that Google wants a seat at the mobile table, and is complaining that the big carriers are keeping them out. Google is going to have a massive fight on its hands trying to find a way to make me look at AdWords on my mobile phone, to convince the carriers that this idea is good for them, and to convince the government that forcing carriers to wholesale part of their spectrum won't result in chaos.

(KEYWORD: DOUBT)

question: "must have" vs "nice to have"

Q1: When you hear sales people (or executives for that matter) say "we need to move from being a 'nice to have' to a 'must have' product", what are they really saying?

(Hint - I don't buy this argument.)

Q2: How many times in your career have you heard this?

word pairing: nuanced doubts

With the passing of cicada madness, you are now ready for another stirring installment of Word Pairings.

The ack/nak blog traffic log (which I compress into the wonderfully glottal 'bloglog') reveals to the careful student (me) just how stunningly popular Word Pairings has become. To which I say, well done (me). Self-congratulation is one sign of a healthy psyche.

Today's pairing is:

Nuanced doubts

Most recently spotted in an article by Independent UK reporter Johann Hari, this pairing takes on a special, poignant life to those of us who can instantly summon a mental image of M. Buckley:

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, " Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

An earlier use of this pairing dating back to October of 2001 in The Atlantic was ascribed to none other than William Bach, famed buddy of Godel and Escher:

After the meeting Bach expressed some nuanced doubts about the process of returns , the current means of re-integration of wartime refugees that has become the focus of international ambitions for Bosnia.

On their own, the constituent elements of nuanced doubts are perfectly energy-neutral:

nuanced (adj.)
Synonyms: nuance, gradation, shade
These nouns denote a slight variation or differentiation between nearly identical entities: sensitive to delicate nuances of style; gradations of feeling from infatuation to deep affection; subtle shades of meaning.

doubt (n.)
1. A lack of certainty that often leads to irresolution. See Synonyms at uncertainty.
2. A lack of trust.
3. A point about which one is uncertain or skeptical: reassured me by answering my doubts.
4. The condition of being unsettled or unresolved: an outcome still in doubt.

Taken together, the two contrarian uses of nuanced doubts provided above highlight the challenge of this word pairing.

• To some, nuanced doubts are perceived as a sign of defective, uncommitted thinking and potential senility.
• To others, nuanced doubts are a sign of intellectual honesty in the face of red-faced knee-jerkism.

As a result, this particular word pairing is the equivalent of a land mine unless you possess complete and perfect knowledge of your listener's peculiar point of view as it relates to the subject of your observation.

Examples to follow.

marsha: marsha marsha

assorted: 10 post-vacation musings

Yes, I'm back. Before I throw myself back into posting at my usual eyeball-burning frequency, I thought I'd take a moment to purge my queue. Ahem.

1. Vacation is good for you. More specifically, it's good for me. I made the critical error of not taking enough vacation over the last eight years as I've worked my way up the product management ladder. All that time I thought I was "paying my dues" and "being the good corporate citizen" all I was doing was exhausting myself. It's tragic and shameful.

2. The new Harry Potter movie was dark, but enjoyable. I'd rank it just behind HP3.

3. Valley Shepherd Creamery was fabulous. I encourage you to go visit this page for some shameless cheese porn. And yes, they ship. The irony of it all is that I lived in Long Valley for seven years, and the year after I leave, these guys show up. They even have a washed-rind cheese that bears a strong (phew) similarity to Taleggio.

4. 30 years after sending off to a little company in Lake Geneva for a small white box containing three paper-covered rulebooks, I finally knuckled under and bought an updated copy of. . . of. . . you know. . . those rules. Just to see what's new, of course. Not that I'm going to be, you know, actually *playing*.

5. The Library of America edition of Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik is required reading. I think it's the functional equivalent of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon - every house needs a copy.

6. My mom sent me home with two pots of European Wild Ginger (Asarum europaeum) and a yell0w-flowered sedum. What a hoot to share cuttings - this is how gardens should grow. Now I just have to figure out what I have that is "sharable". Maybe some of that fountain grass. . .

7. I had a few messages over the break about my search for a digital version of Intertype Vogue. Here is some extra information from Ed Inman from last October:

"[Vogue] was marketed in 12 different weights/widths. Nothing terribly unusual. Basically a Futura knockoff with a few distinctive characters, notably the caps G & Q and lower case j."

Here's a specimen sheet of plain Vogue. To date, I've not been able to find anyone who has considered recreating the font. Sorry.



8. During a trip to the Old Book Shop in Morristown, NJ, I picked up the latest copy of Book Source Magazine. If you are a used book hound, or if you just love to hunt down local used book stores during your travels, buy a copy. It's a small magazine, 51 pages for a dollar, with a limited circulation (5,000 copies per issue) and very high production values. I'm sure I've seen it at antiquarian book fairs, but I never actually bought a copy before. For shame.

9. Another magazine companion from the last two weeks was BBC Gardens Illustrated. Of all the garden magazines I've ever read, this one is the best. I challenge you to tell me about a better one. The only thing that brings me more garden magazine joy is the winter avalanche of seed catalogs.

10. When I was putting away my copy of Munchkin - a big hit with the kids - I stumbled across my deck of Whimsy Cards. The thought came to me: wouldn't it be fun to create a deck of cards like this for product planning meetings. Something a little less oblique than, say, Oblique Strategies.

Bonus Musing

11. Less planning, more doing.

interlude: sun and strategy

No, I'm not dead or trapped in an old fridge somewhere in Teaneck.

I'm "on the road", catching some rays and working on a strategy document. Somewhere between my first beer and my last Chupacablahblah, a tenuous link between the two suddenly became clear to me.

You need the sun to live - you can't thrive without a well-articulated strategy. Actually, you can live without both for a while, but you end up kind of pasty and unhealthy-looking.

If you get too much sun, you'll get a sunburn or some wild face-eating melanoma - if you spend too much time working on your strategy, you burn out or get killed by someone who spent less time on strategy and more on execution.

The best way to enjoy the sun is with your friends and family - just like the best way to articulate a strategy is with the help of your colleagues, each of whom brings a different and unique perspective to "where you're going".

Ultimately, the tan wears off, and you have to get some more sun - the same way that you strategy grows stale over time, and needs an infusion of reality. Put another way, the same way you don't expect to keep your tan, you can't expect your strategy to stay fresh-looking forever.

OK, maybe this isn't the best analogy. I blame the Chupacablahblah.