Livin' the Island Life

“Don't worry Wilson, I'll do all the paddling. You just hang on.” Chuck Noland

I spent a large amount of time last night talking with a good friend who’s in the process of starting a new business. It’s a bold move in a shaky economy but he’s highly committed and way past the point of no return. Everything is coming together, sort of, and he should up and running before the end of the year.

His angst is he has played “you bet your future” with this venture and although surrounded with really good people that he’s hand picked the realization that he’s, to use his phrase, “on the island by myself” is overwhelming him. The fact that everyone else is one bad mood away from waltzing away and leaving him stranded at this critical stage is eating at him right now.

It’s a tough spot. On one hand he wants to be the one in control, especially since it’s his money. On the other he wants people to be as committed as he is. I suggested he offer a piece of the action to those most key to his success. His counter was that offering a percentage of the business is fine, but if it’s merely “given” then there’s still no incentive to hang in - nothing in, nothing out, net zero.

OK, so make it be earned based upon benchmarks of success.

His counter, that’s good too but how does that help assure they’ll stay during this brutal start-up process.

OK, how about cash incentives for all the current effort.

Counter: “I’m doing this out of my own pocket, there’s just not a lot of extra cash”

Hmm….so ultimately this comes down to faith, guts and character. If his hand picked key people believe in his vision, know that he’s risking a large piece of life and wealth and trust that they will, in fact, realize pieces of the success of the business then there’s a good chance they’ll play the key roles he’s depending on both now and later.

If some (or all) of those elements are missing then all bets are off and my friend had better start figuring out some back up plans still knowing that new people will bring the same uncertainty and heartburn with them.

Funny, being in control a lot of times is everything but.

Building the Perfect Beast

"There is no glory in otustripping donkeys." Marcus Valerius Martialis

I wrote a while back about one of my personal and professional afflictions.

Pleaser’s Dilemma

One of the side effects of this affliction is the residual damage caused from the accumulation of weight while lugging all these “stones” around every day. The analogy would be small stones on the back of an ass. Each one is insignificant but there comes a time where the one you pack on breaks the back of the beast.

I had this happen the other day where a seemingly insignificant event sparked a meltdown that took me and, for sure, the people around me totally off guard. One of the problems with being a perpetual nice guy (yes, I really am a nice guy….really. No really) is when the dark side immerses no one really knows what to do with it. Me included.

So, I had myself locked in my cage for a couple of days in order to take everything apart, examine, clean and put back together with some reinforced pieces.

As I stated in Pleaser’s Dilemma I have no interest in changing the beast itself because it’s how I’m wired. See Hard Wired. But I do need to make the beast stronger as well learn to not pack on so many stones.

It’s funny, while locked away and tearing everything apart I was amused with how I knew the meltdown was close and actually made a weak attempt to bail out of the obligation that caused the spark that caused the meltdown. However, had I done that the meltdown would have only been temporarily delayed, not eliminated. Somehow I need to figure out a preventive maintenance program.

So, if you find yourself carrying too many stones, too often and too far and have found an effective way to both strengthen and reduce let me know the program.

In the meantime I’m going to test my new, stronger, reinforced beast by going back to the innocent bystanders that got blistered by my meltdown and offer to carry their stones around for a while.

One Year Later

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” Maria Robinson

One year ago today my family and my friends laid my wife Bonnie to rest at a little country cemetery in Southern Indiana. Interesting is that it's the farming community where I grew up not hers. But I think she always loved the beauty and serenity of the rolling southern Indiana countryside.

There's no proper adjective to describe the last 365 days. The lowest of lows, the darkest of dark, the coldest of cold combined with the discovery (and rediscovery) of the strength of family and friends and the human ability to heal and regenerate. The remembrance and regret, the fond memories and pain, the reflection and celebration all combine to paint a complex mosaic.

I walk into Year 2 ready to celebrate the past and embrace the future. Life is truly an adventure which means it's not a spectator sport. Bonnie was never a spectator, it's one of the many great lessons I learned from her.

Please see my post from last year, I still consider it one of my best.

Remembering Bonnie

They're cute when they're young

“Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own." Sidney J. Harris

By virtue of having always been in the technology business I have forever worked around young people. When I was young so was everyone else since the whole industry was young. Oh, I once had a boss who was forty, but he was an anomaly. As I grew older the young people, who now could actually go to school to be in the business, started packing in behind me and slowly me and my contemporaries became the minority as well as the ancient.

This has been good in so many ways. Young people bring so much energy and possess fearlessness that hasn’t yet been extracted from them. They bring new vision and new thoughts and new music and new language. They see things so differently.

Because of all this I’ve always felt younger than my age but I suppose many of us do as we reach “middle age”. But when you have to show up every day and work and hang with young people and then work for young people you get to make a choice.

Adapt and embrace or fight and fail.

I’m finding many of my old buddies slipping more and more into the fight and fail category. Not because they can’t adapt, not because they can’t keep up and not because they don’t have the juice anymore. See Old and Bold.

No, it’s mainly because they’re tired of having the exact same conversation on the exact same subject for the 9,487th time. Almost always with some Wunderkind who’s convinced they’ve found some problem so totally new and so totally different that no dinosaur from the age of mainframes could ever “get it”.

The problem is we “get it” too well since we’ve probably solved this type problem a thousand different times. So we tend to roll our eyes, sigh, give a 30 word explanation for solution and try to get on to other things. But Kid Wonder cannot accept that his totally unique situation can have such a straight-forward (and usually fairly simple) solution.

Arrogance vs. Apathy. And then the fight began

Part of the problem, as I’ve stated, is if you go back to our beginnings we were young but so was everyone else so we didn’t have the age barrier issues. Thus we never really adapted ourselves to young vs. old dynamics. Everyone was screaming at everyone else because we all, naturally, were right and we just had to get the others to shut up and listen.

So, yeah, we old’ns need to do a better job of catering to the ego of Boy Blunder. We need to frown and rub our temples, squint our eyes and proclaim that this, indeed, is a tough one and that we may need a few days to research and contemplate.

Nothing a week at Pebble Beach (on the company) probably wouldn’t solve.

Can I get a hand here, Captain?

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” Peter Drucker

Late Friday night I was in zombie zone after a long, hard, draining week. Not wanting to flop in bed too early for fear of popping awake in the middle of the night I decided to find something mind numbing on TV. And there it was a Season 1 episode of Star Trek. Who says you can’t find anything to watch with 732 satellite channels.

This was a really early one before Scotty and Sulu where all characters except Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were strictly death scene bait.

I was struck by how bad the acting really was and how cheesy the effects were but as I watched more I decided it was hard to tell how bad the acting was because of how bad the writing and directing was.

And then the money shot scene (as far as being a catalyst for this post, anyway).

The alien character was split between a “good” one and a “bad” one who were battling each other. Pretty normal stuff. Near the end the “good” alien convinces Kirk he can lure the “bad” one into an area where he can be captured. All he has to do is alter some of the controls on his small space vehicle. When Kirk asks if he can do it the alien says (here’s the good part). “Yes, captain, with your help I think I can do it”. Fade Scene.

New Scene. Alien is up to his neck in wires and modules and Kirk is leisurely leaning against the craft chatting him up. Not holding a spare part, a flashlight, a user manual. ((You can insert your state's DOT stories anywhere along withe way here.) Hell, he could have at least had a bottle of turtle wax and been buffing the panel of the spacecraft with his velour shirt.

Big help. Thanks Jim.

Jeez, how many times have we all had this happen? More importantly, how many times have we been Kirk?

A buddy of mine used to have a great poster of these cowboys riding hell for leather down a hill toward a river with the caption, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”.

Or maybe if you’re the captain it’s “Lead, Loaf, or Lean”.

OK, let's try this one more time

"The reason I talk to myself is that I'm the only one whose answers I accept." George Carlin

I got what’s become my weekly call from an old friend and acquaintance that’s on the job market. It was pretty much déjà vu all over again. No, not that another talented person lost their job, but that another long time friend who I hadn’t spoken to in many months broke The Strouse Manifesto which reads, “The two times you call everyone you’ve ever known is when you get a job and when you lose a job”. He had waited almost two months before getting started. The other part of the Manifesto reads, “Oh, and for the love of God, don’t wait until you lose your job to call people you know”.

Another buddy and I were talking about this over dinner tonight. There’s become this list of mutual friends where our conversations go like this:

Me: “Hey, guess who I got a call from today?”
Him: “Who?”
Me: Jimmy Billy Bob Joe MacDaddy
Him” “Whadda he want?”

Yep, they’ve become a cliché. The only time you ever hear from them is when they want something. The phone call or email come in from good ‘ol Jimmy Billy Bob and you roll your eyes knowing he’s out on the street and now is doing his “networking”.

Networking is a full-time gig and requires calls where you really do only want to know how the other person is doing, or you’re calling to make them aware of someone else being on the street, or you can’t remember if their daughter is graduating this year or next.

Now, let me be evenhanded, you can’t possibly stay in touch with everyone all the time. It’s not reasonable or practical and we’ve all called people strictly because we want something. I'm as guilty as everyone else and I'm sure there's people who will read this and label me a hypocrite. But when over the course of a couple of decades that’s the only time, well, you become a cliché.

People, I’ve preached this before (Tough Talk). Networks are funny things, easy to start, hard to perfect and can be lost from neglect.

So, start today, make a list and start contacting people just to say hello and find out how they’re doing. Note: How they are doing, not you, them.

There’s more but I really have call a couple of people tonight before it gets too late.

WWTD

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?' Don Marquis

A friend was telling me about his latest escapade in the working world where his large company, that became larger by buying his previous large company, was being bought by a yet larger (largerer?) company. The new company uber-large company was promising great and marvelous things….for the investors, and thus were promising 70% downsizing to the rank-in-file.

So my buddy is dutifully going through the job search drill trying to beat the buzzer.

When I asked him how he was holding up his reply was “WWTD”.

“WWTD?”

“Will Work Till Death”

Ah-Ha and Amen.

I read an article a while back that stated that my parents generation – Depression era/ WWII – are the only group in the history of civilization that will get to “Retire”. Prior to them people just worked until they couldn’t go anymore then depended on family members to put them up for their remaining days which was usually a short amount of time.

My parents are in their mid-eighties, in good health, been retired since sixty-five, and are scared to death of running out of money. No one born in the 1920’s dreamed of living so long.

Now come the Boomers, followed by the Gen-X and Gen-Y folks and who knows how long “normal” life spans become and how much dough it’ll take to live outside of squalor.

But I know this, I’m not counting on company retirement plans (hell, the last company I worked for that had one was in the ‘70’s), Social Security (snort), Government programs (snort, snort) or professional investment groups (sn…nevermind).

Nope, WWTD is my slogan (unless I win that Mega Millions jackpot).