Dropping The Other Shoe, Again

A baby girl, just taking her first steps, fell backwards, hitting her head on the sidewalk.

She looked up at me trying to figure out what had just happened. I looked back at her and started a big laugh.

She thought for a few seconds and started laughing with me. Crisis averted.

Her mother started screaming, swooped over, picked up the baby, and glared at me. Scared me and the baby, who started howling, turned red, began choking, hiccuping, all in all had a very scary experience.

Now I’m not generally in favor of fall-down-go-boom, but when it happens, we have a choice how we react.

Technically, the kid was yowling over being snatched by a hysterical big person. Big people are supposed to know best.

If my boss is going to lose it, I should, too. A contact panic, if you will, or at least team loyalty. Possibilities come when you Drop The Other Shoe.

When the going gets tough, are you the cause of the problem, part of the solution, or a hysterical distraction?

I haven’t noticed any of those three roles keep tight situations from occurring, but they have a lot to do with successful outcomes, building a crew, and having experienced arms and legs for the next opportunity.

And for all you pre-planners out there, I haven’t seen that avoidance is a better strategy. The penalties for avoiding a problem are to some extent debilitating and can be terminal. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

A heroic opportunity is a terrible thing to waste. 

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Also, don't miss our next show! September 11, 6:30 to 8:30 pm, Drop The Other Shoe, the first 300 seconds of The Next Business Opportunity: Big Data, Cloud, or Social Media? featuring Chida Sadayappan. Capital Technology Management Hub, Tysons Corner, Free.

Changing Education

Video is a powerful educational tool. With internet distribution and storage, a world class video can easily be shared globally. Salman Khan of the Khan Academy has been making short videos that teach specific technical skills to students from elementary school to graduate level. These are available for free on the web.

One of the challenges of internet based video education is that students aren’t really learning, they just feel like they are learning, let’s call that couch potato syndrome. That’s a small, easily addressed problem. The larger problem is presenters faxing in their performance while standing at the front of a classroom.

Sebastian Thrun, who knows something about education, puts it this way, “You don’t lose weight by watching someone else exercise,” he says. “You don’t learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.”

So lesson one is Go Make Something. Come to think of it, that’s what work is these days.

A major change in learning is information is available anywhere. In the old days, students went to University to learn the Canon of Western Civilization, all three books, because there was a good chance that when they went back home, they weren’t going to see another book again. Scholars were walking search engines. They weren’t expected to work, they were expected to provide answers and educate the baron’s whelps in their downtime.

There are still people who think their job is to have an opinion and opine. Nice work if you can get it.

For most of us, job one is to turn that knowledge into something valuable, on demand.

The purpose of video education is to provide the knowledge. Education comes from using it to make something useful.

Another value of video education is modeling behavior. Kipling provided Victorian behavior modeling through his writing, and The Man Who Would Be King shows heroic behavior, like High Noon, and even Leroy Jethro Gibbs or Frank Reagan.

Let’s take the best parts of video and work it like a rented mule in the interests of better education.

Bring It!

Jimmy Valentine, the famous safecracker, would sandpaper his fingertips before commencing to winkle open a safe.

Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five.

Yesterday I committed my first successful Hangout, Google Plus videoconference. Just like AT&T predicted in the fifties, only in color...with a bigger screen!

Zack, our technical architect, was on the call and got passionate about the mission and the value of our next company, and I thought, “Wow! How can I get that on paper?”

Now I know “Why video?” You can bring the passion. You can use the passion.

So I thought I was ready for last night’s DC Week Keynotes. I like Peter Corbett. He is Peter Pan bringing technology to the lost boys of Washington. When he advertises Keynote“s”, he’s not kidding.

Mayor Vince Gray introduced the members of five DC school robotics clubs.

Genevieve Bell, Intel’s anthropologist taught me about the third place, and made me desperately want to see more when I look.

Scott Kelly from Ford had the video of the blind former Mustang owner of 25 years ago hitting 140 on the salt flats in the new Mustang. Did I care? I don’t know. I was crying too hard.

Game over. Or so I thought.

Coming in to the Warner Theatre. We were given copies of Brian Solis’ The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution.

I had just seen Brian for the first time, interviewing John Battelle earlier in the week, so I was pleased. Okay. He’s good.

Wrong. Brian comes out and upends my business paradigm in the first three minutes. Sure you can build an app, but why bother if you’re not going to make the world a much better place? You’ve got the power! Figure out how to use it!

That wasn’t a harangue. It was examples that made me laugh, made me cry, made me mad. We’re now in an Egosystem – all those apps that revolve around you.

Brian’s right. But what if it’s hard?

You want hard? Check out Frank Warren. Frank Warren is on a daily campaign to stare down death and win. He has a website and books as PostSecret, a where people can post their secrets, share them so they become less terrible. Money from that goes to train suicide prevention volunteers at IMAlive.

I would come to a full stop any time for a Frank Warren. But Murphy’s Law “If anything can go wrong it will,” has kicked in with a vengeance. AV support, which has been much more art than science to this point, grinds to a full stop.

How does this affect Frank Warren?

He sees it, he acknowledges it, but not for a second does his focus waver from converting the audience. I guess if your main occupation is staring down death and winning, a little computer nonsupport is a grin.

Finally after adlibbing, starting the balloon toss above the audience, leaving us to entertain ourselves while he goes backstage to assist, and finally getting meaningful help from a geek computer scientist in the audience, Oz appears.

That whole segue was the definition of Master of the Universe.

Keynote“s” Yup.

And the message given to me that day?

Find the passion. Bring it.

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