TEDx rehearsals

Well, for those of you who yearn to do a TED talk sometime, go read Chris Anderson's provocative and insightful piece in the Harvard Biz Review: 

http://hbr.org/2013/06/how-to-give-a-killer-presentation/ar/

For those of you interested in "HELP" on doing all of this, I heartily recommend a "Coach".  My coach for this process is Kathleen Ohm     Find her at www.linkedin.com/in/kathyohm     

Kathy is TERRIFIC, in a word.  She is zealous about "your opening" which has to GRAB people; and "the close" which has to be actionable.  And you need to be succinct, engaging, etc.  But what works with Kathy for me is that she is thoughtful and pertinent on the specifics of "my talk"

By the way, rehearsal, Rehearsal, REHEARSAL seems to be a huge part of all of this.  Whew!

But then, why give a poor talk.  One answer I've heard from folk over the years is: "so I don't have to do this again".  Now there's someone seeking to avoid opportunity!

So, over to you.  Who is your preferred speech coach?

OH, AND FOR CONTENT ADVICE AND PERSPECTIVE, I HAVE TO MENTION KENNAN, WHO HAS LABORED TO KEEP ME SANE THROUGH ALL OF THIS.  She has a tough task in that regard

Kennan Kellaris Salinero, 
Director,
Yámana Science and Technology
www.yamanascience.org

Apple Taxes and the SV Biz Journal poll

James MacGregor can't resist most Fridays, posing some provocative comment from the week's news

Today, he asked, what about Apple Taxes, in the following way, with the current results shown:

Business Pulse - Polls and Surveys

Is Apple in the right about overseas taxes?

Is Apple in the right about overseas taxes?

Yes, it's legal and Apple needs to keep its taxes low64%

No. It needs to pay taxes on the money stashed overseas36%

Votes Cast: 120

So, this begs some assessment.  

First of all, there hasn't been TOO MUCH commentary about whether the way Apple did things is legal.   At first blush, what Apple, and for that matter, the entire Fortune 100 have been doing with these stashes is not only legal, it is encouraged by the arcane US tax code.  

And every company "needs to keep its taxes low" as does every household.  So, how can you vote anything but YES?  

And for a Business Journal, of all places, to record 36% NO votes on a question that begs a YES answer by its very wording, there clearly is something else going on here.

What?

Well, for one thing, essentially most large American corporations, especially high-tech ones with global sales (HP and IBM for example sell 70% of their products abroad; Apple is today about 61%), do some variant of what Apple does.  Google had a mere $30B of revenue 'evade taxation' last year, since their 'search' is centered in, guess where, IRELAND.  And Ireland was INSISTENT, for example, that Apple had to pay taxses on their fair share of their "Irish" earnings.  They charged them a full 2% tax on the $30B that Apple attributed to Ireland 'earnings' versus the 35% that would be due in the USA.  2% of $30B is $600M, not a bad haul for Irish tax coffers, probably bigger than Guinness even, or the defunct Waterford Crystal works.  But the US government, and hence you and I, got 'cheated' out of $10B on this one transaction, which is pretty good-sized compared to the $6B that Tim Cook proudly pointed to that Apple did pay the US government on their sizable earnings ($41B).

Other countries are having some difficulty with this as well.  Labour Leader Ed Miliband in the UK read out the 2004 IPO founding passage, in which Page and Brin wrote: "Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."

Referring to that, the Labour leader said: "I can't be the only person in this room who feels deeply disappointed that a great company like Google, with great founding principles, should be reduced to arguing that even though it employs thousands of people here in Britain, makes billions of pounds in revenue here in Britain, that it's fair that it should pay just a fraction of 1% of that in tax."

Miliband referred to comments by Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who has previously said that Google's tax arrangements – by which "sales" are begun in the UK but "completed" in Ireland, where it pays a small corporation tax rate – are "just capitalism".

Miliband retorted: "I'm sorry that Eric Schmidt isn't here this morning to hear me say this directly. When Google does great things I will praise you. But when Eric Schmidt says that its current approach to tax is just capitalism, I disagree. And when when Google goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying its taxes, I say it's wrong. And it's not just me that says it, it's Google's founding principles, and it's crystal clear from them."

The silliest argument is the one that has been put forth by business leaders, ala the gift they got in 2004 from President George W, and Congress, when they allowed repatriating $312 Billion (yup, that is a big number) at 5% taxation rate rather than 35%, when the leaders claimed it would go for new US jobs primarily (this was at the height, we thought, of the outsourcing and offshoring craze).  Five firms (IBM and HP, plus Merck, Pfizer, and J&J) brought back 28% of the money, and while they were at it, laid off another 21,000 workers in the US.  Ten more firms handled another 25% of the repatriated funds, while 827 other firms shared in the final 47% of 'savings.  What happened, acc. to watchdog groups, was that 92% of the repatriated money went to shareholders and executive bonuses; no net jobs in the US resulted.

Since then, the numbers have BALLOONED.  Some $1.9 Trillion (6x the last truancy) is now stashed, THAT WE KNOW ABOUT, and in Apple's case the DoJ and IRS are claiming there was at least 1/3rd more than that.  This starts to be serious money, even alongside America's deficit spending loops.

I don't have a solution here -- the whole thing about international competitiveness and taxation in various venues has plenty of argumentation space, and plenty of money involved to get major governments excited -- recall why so many corporations are incorporated in Delaware for example, and recall the 8,700 Americans who willingly accepted Citibank's help to use these tax havens.  Then ponder the magnitude: The anonymity of the offshore world makes it difficult to track the flow of money. A study by James S. Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, estimates that wealthy individuals have $21 trillion to $32 trillion in private financial wealth tucked away in offshore havens — roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined.  

Well, not exactly a rant, but suggestive of why 36% of a business audience would maybe say, "Hey, wait a minute.  Can't the world's largest and most profitable hight-tech firm pay some semblence of what all the rest of us have to pay?  Aren't they taking advantage of the American Way, with its military strength, great universities, low terrorism and high first-responder quality, plus good roads (well ...) and clean water and so on.    

So, the "right answer" is NO to MacGregor's question.  But, it is irrelevant basically.  Is there hope for a redress in the tax code?  NO.  If Congress cannot figure out a gun law situation that defies rationality, how could it possibly deal with something that touches every major donor to the next election?

Contra Costa Times about TEDx

A great story today in the Contra Costa Times, see http://bit.ly/12QpgK0 

This TED business (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is actually a pretty big deal.  We've all had speech coaching, rehearsals, timed presentations.... a lot of scripted capability is what made TED the premier conference that it has been now for nearly thirty years.  When they decided to franchise it, the rules included some heavy-duty quality control, and I believe this is well placed thinking.

The theme for the Livermore TEDx -- June 8th -- is "Creating our Future:  Educate and Innovate."  

Here's what the lead producer has to say about picking this theme:

"The idea is that you select a theme, and imagine bringing together the most fascinating group of dinner guests you'd love to have around your table sharing their ideas," said event co-organizer Rosalind Hamar, head of Valley Montessori School in Livermore. "There is so much talk about education and how important it's going to be for the future, but so often people in the business of education don't have dialogues with those in innovation. It seemed to us that we needed a conference that brought together people from both sides of that equation."

Livermore is a short hop from "Silicon Valley" -- as in forty-five minutes from, say, Cogswell College in Sunnyvale.  Ample parking, sunny day -- why not?  You ought to consider coming, it's only $75, cheaper than a Disneyland day by far -- and far more apt to be rewarding.

Check out the Contra Costa Times story, and set aside the day.  As the TV guy says, "You'll like it.  I GUARANTEE IT"

Learning models for the 21st century

One of the very real joys of InnovaScapes Insitiute is the breadth of topics we are privileged to consider.  You've probably gotten a taste of that in previous posts -- topics from COPD causes to CAD designs to semi-logarithmic math for business students, and then to Milken Foundation competition versus the Silicon Valley Forum for entrepreneurs, and the risk to American middle class jobs from the turmoil and tumult in our tech-crazy world.

One of the very real constraints of the Institute is the eagerness with which I tend to seize each of them, diluting the focus and risking superficiality in the process.  (Or, maybe, as my mother would counsel, that is the story of my life -- the perennial dilettante).  But, why not savor the exciting topics out there?

I awode early this morning, infused with the enthusiasm of the gathering last evening for a small group around ALearn, a local non-profit "math intervention group" here in the 'Valley' (this almost always means "Silicon Valley" in my parlance, except when it doesn't).  ALearn was founded by Kathryn Hanson, a driven woman who is fearless, tireless, and focused on one problem -- helping middle-school kids overcome their fears and issues with first-year algebra.  Kathryn seems born to this mission, with early training as a teacher, and a passionate belief in math and science as the key enabler for careers.  She was a marketing consultant for HP in the heady days leading up to HP LaserJet release (and she privately shared with me that our book, The HP Phenomenon, got some of those historic times slightly askew); I did not know her from her HP days, but we of course knew lots of folk in common.

Her Board chair is Diane Frankle, a human dynamo big in Silicon Valley legalese.  Diane and I worked together on the Board of a company, Pretzel Logic, doing enterprise software in 1997-2000; after the dot.com meltdown, its founders "pivoted" (as they say now in Venture Capital circles) into Persistent Software, founded and headed by Anand Deshpande in India (who today is on the local Computer History Museum Board).  It's fun to get re-acquainted with Diane around an entirely different topic.

I wrote about ALearn a bit on February 13, in a post called "Minority Math Skills".  If you don't recall it, it is (relatively) easy to retrieve it in this blog.  What I didn't include there was some of the success stories "in the small".  Last night we were offered brief speeches and testimony from five students.  One described herself as a "C+" student whose major goal was not to get "F's" until she met ALearn's summer math class. Now, she says, her goal is to go to UC Berkeley or maybe NYU -- this from a ninth grader whose parents never attended college, who certainly weren't urging her to consider it.

Another student said he took the summer program because he "didn't have a job so he had nothing to do that summer".  He now is on fire, because he is qualified for a college track and he has been given a "reality dose" by his mentor, a college student who was in the program six years ago.

And John Porter, superintendent of the Franklin-McKinley School District, told the ninety guests that in his view the program was having as much impact on the teachers as on the students.  He sees the teachers getting excited, both for the success of the kids but also for their own learning.  Porter, on the ALearn Board, is highly qualified to talk to these topics.  He founded the acclaimed Saturday Science Academy program with JPL and NASA, teaching 4th through 8th graders science across America.  He is articulate, passionate, and eminently rational.  See his bio at http://fmsd.org/District/Department/57-Superintendent.  And enthuse that a man of this quality, accomplishment, and perspective will donate significant time to ALearn!

Porter's approach fit right into the philosophy being espoused in the 2011 book by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, "A New Culture of Learning", that was pressed in my hand by the new Provost at Cogswell College, Deb Snyder.  She is seeking to have Douglas Thomas come to Cogswell for that all-important inspirational talk (we talked about how to persuade him to quote a reduced speaking fee).

I couldn't put the book down in the late evening.  JSB (John Seely Brown's moniker to friends) is on the U C Santa Barbara Center for Information Technology in Society advisory board with me; he is the long-time director of XeroxPARC's fabled research lab before retiring and joining the USC Annanberg Center.  He and Thomas argue that playful games are the secret to most learning in an unstructured world going forward.  The book is larded with example after example.

I thought overnight about some of the attendees.  Joel Orr and his wife Dalia -- Joel is a long-time CAD developer, now an accomplished author/speaker.  Dalia emigrated as an adult, learning English, new customs, a new culture.  They've raised, hummn, fourteen questing grand-children.  And Joel is tireless too, about STEM education.  Joel was a co-founder and still prominent leader for COFES, the Congress Of the Future of Engineering Software, reported on in three posts in April in this blog.

And so is Cogswell College, a great litle digital media school whose CEO Janis Paulson along with Deb Snyder attended.   Cogswell just opened a summer high-school program -- 19 eager kids (they'd hoped for five) signed up, and now a Stockton principal wants to send a busload daily for two weeks!  I haven't yet blogged much about Cogswell, but the stories are magnificent, and I had a little something to do with them, so it would be a prideful moment to describe some of their many achievements.  Suffice here to say that they serve a very unique student body -- long on kids with modest grades but high passion for artistic bent coupled with math -- with a fully accredited four-year program and a job placement record that is astounding in the digital media world.

Media X at Stanford (Martha Russell, its director was in attendance) had that same perspective, as does Stanford's D'School.  Martha pioneered some fabulous social-media visual presentations a couple of years ago, that have been sought by DoD and NSF as examples of a new way of considered math and science interpretive skills.  The Media X founder, Byron Reeves, extolled 'gamification' for students and business alike, in his great book, Total Engagement.

This kind of learning is oft labled "Project-based learning".  It is the cornerstone of the Thomas and Brown book, and their myriad examples.  It was what I saw with a step-son years ago who was failing high school math, but who could recompute the batting averages in his head for the entire San Francisco Giants baseball team on the drive home from the game.

Barbara Adey, one of Cisco's key execs (and a key marketer of Cisco's pioneering Telepresence system), is on ALearn's board, as is Webb McKinney, the HP VP who engineered the successful merger of Compaq with HP a decade ago.  They're with ALearn because they see daily what it means for students to grasp these arcane skills -- their lives open up instead of close down.

What if these dedicated supporters, observers and commentators are right?  What if we are in fact building the best possible education system in the world, for the world of the 21st century, right in front of our faces, while decrying that "schools are broken".  What's broken is the model of a stable, learnable, set of curricula that will sustain us for a lifetime, and the job of the teacher is to open the cranium of kids and pour facts in until full.  The new model is collaborative, internet-based, experiential, engaging, compelling even, and playful -- ask a kid about the Harry Potter series, and they know every costume, event, backdrop, twist.  How? Why"  ALearn's dedicated interns, leaders and board gave that great testimony last night.

I didn't mention Nan Geschke and her husband Chuck, which would be a singular omission.  Nan is a neighbor to Kathryn, and as such was pressed into helping (as she modestly put it).  She opened her beautiful garden for the event, and the weather co-operated, although early on it was a bit blustery.  I was almost agog at the trees and the flowers -- a grand Japanese maple framed four large pots of "The Fairy" rose that were billowing their luscious pink blooms at the landing as we descended the steps to the hidden grotto below, along a bridge and path outlined with coral pink impatiens, tended "just so".

Nan has been a huge supporter not only of ALearn, but of the Los Altos Museum, where she co-ordinated part of the 2007 exhibit around Lucile and Dave Packard's life.  Her long-time friend Bob Grimm was in attendance too; Bob was a strong leader for San Jose's Tech Museum for many years -- he's working on more projects for both groups right now, at 84+ years old, an indefatigable ex-mayor of Los Altos.

In this early morning rush of enthusiasm, I'm inclined to start a new blog on 21st century learning models -- separate it from the InnovaScapes Institute main thread a bit.  In a more sober moment, my guilt complex muses: maybe categorizing all these enthusiasms will somehow make my eclectic choices appear more focused so Mom, if she were still here to cajole, could be pleased.

And then I think of my grandmother Helen, a third-grade educated adopted waif who never lost her zest for learning, and who imparted to me HER love of learning (in my own formative third-grade year when I lived with her).  When she was a wizened eighty-nine years old and I had just become HP's Corporate Engineering Director, she quizzed (actually accosted) me about HP-invented gallium-arsenide semiconductors that made possible satellite dish communications for her South Dakota farmer friends and family.  She was into "internet" even before Al Gore.

ALearn has a website.  Go see it.  And muse about John Porter's statement to us that of 120 students the first year for ALearn, all but four passed college entrance math tests at tenth grade, and 88% enrolled in college.  This from a Latino demographic that has 14% college-educated parents, and historically 23% success with Algebra 1, let alone any higher math.

JSB's book is available.  Get it.  But be forewarned, not everyone agrees.  There are several negative reviews (I always like to read the 1-star and 2-star reviews to get some balance).   Not everyone is a believer -- Truth, bottled, sometimes doesn't quench thirst.  Education is in the eye of the beholder.

TEDx in Livermore

TED conferences are famous by now for their liveliness, their current material, and their networking.  When the TED group decided to put the show on-line, it was predicted that they'd soon fail.  NOPE.  When the TED group decided to franchise "independently organized TED events" as TEDx's, it was predicted that they'd soon fail.  NOPE.

These are great events. They are run under strict guidelines, analogous to the "main events".  This one will be no exception.  First of all, a timely topic:  CREATING OUR FUTURE: INNOVATE and EDUCATE.  America is facing an uncertain future, worse in many respects than almost anytime in the past 150 years (yes, the Civil War was worse, and so probably were the early days of the Republic and the nervousness around the War of 1812).

The issues now?  Well, balance of payments, economic uncertainty, loss of mainline jobs, lack of 'new jobs' to replace those being displaced, terrorism threats, bankrupt cities and states (and maybe a nation?)  -- we could build a long list if we were so inclined.  So this meeting will focus on initiatives and innovations small and large, that as I've listened to the rehearsals (when is the last time you attended a conference and the presenters even knew each other, let alone rehearsed together?), will get attention.

I'm flattered that I've been invited to speak -- this is a hot speaker list, so it is a real privilege for InnovaScapes Institute to have a role.   My talk will build from the recent conferences -- the Milken gig,   the I4J summit, the Silicon Valley Forum, and the Caltech National Academy talk, and oh yes, COFES

I expect to focus on RESILIENCY as a key factor for INNOVATION.  It is true that VCs look for the qualities of the person (energy, enthusiasm, passion, and perseverance); then the quality of the idea (how big is it, how important, what market need does it fill, and can it scale); and then the team (do they share goals, can they work together, is there a track record of execution).   Funding, and evidence of market sales, are key as well.  And of course a million intangibles.

And we often hear about INNOVATION and CREATIVITY as fundamental in all of this.  But when those words are invoked, they usually are code for "a breakthrough idea or product or service".  What I will try to demonstrate is that these are also fundamental for the much more emotional parts of a start-up which is the fact that most businesses have the idea morph four times (the "pivot") before finding a winning hand.  Teams fracture in such turmoil; no one "Knows" what to do, so who keeps or gets the leadership role; the 'gotchas' are everywhere and creativity is the only out -- creativity in just about every aspect of the business.

How do you do this, and maintain sanity, if not control?  Come and hear the talk!

Livermore CA will host a TEDx conference JUNE 8

Coming to your town, if your town is LIVERMORE, CA.  Title: "Creating Our Future: Innovate and Educate".  Not a bad topic for this day and age!  Competing though with the Fastest Rodeo in the West, the fabled Livermore Rodeo and parade.  Wow... is that coincidence or what?

TEDx Livermore will be June 8, 2013 at Las Positas College in Livermore, CA.  Livermore is home of the fabled Lawrence Livermore Labs, and also home to the Nissens over the years.

This post is about Livermore, more than about TEDx.  The next one is about TEDx

Livermore, with 82,039 folk in 2011, was 855 folk in 1890, 1,391 folk in 1900, 2,885 folk in 1940, and 4,384 in 1950.  Lawrence Livermore Labs, a national weapons lab for the Hydrogen bomb work originally, was developed starting in 1949, managed by U C Berkeley.  It quadrupled the town population, to 16,058 by 1960, and the growth has continued.  The Labs today, no longer under Berkeley management, are part of the US energy program and a major fusion effort has been underway at LLNL for years.  6,700 folk work there today, so in some key way, the area is tied to this big think tank.

The Nissens, you say?  Well, they predate LLNL by a lot.

Hans Nissen was born in 1848 in Denmark, emigrated to Murray (now Dublin), Alameda County, CA in 1869, and married Anna Christiansen in 1873.  Settling in what is now Livermore (then part of Murray Township), they had eight children, five sons and three daughters, including the eldest son Charles Magnus (b. 1874, d. 1945) and the youngest daughter, May (b. 1884, d. 1981).

May Nissen became a schoolteacher, actually THE schoolteacher for the one-room Livermore school house.  She was very popular, eventually retiring as a high school English teacher.  Through an unspecified kindness, the first Livermore Park, May Nissen Park, was opened in 1962 at 685 Rincon Avenue.  The park at opening had two swimming pools, six basketball courts, a public library, three softball fields, four tennis courts, and an elementary school.  It was THE PLACE for a while.

The eldest son, Charles Marcus, married in town to Susan Graham in 1909.  They had two sons and two daughters.  The youngest son, Jim, b. 1915, fell in love with planes.   There are some famous pictures of  the great Pacific Clipper Ships (seaplanes) flying UNDER the Bay Bridge, and through the partially built Golden Gate.  Jim flew the one "under" the Bay Bridge, a total violation of all the laws of the day, but he claimed (in the best "wrong way Corrigan" style) that the plane didn't have enough lift to go over the bridge.  Jim built an airstrip at his Greenville home in Livermore; it is still there, owned by his grand-daughter Kate.

The keys to this man, who could have gotten the keys to Livermore for his deeds -- he built the San Jose Airport, he was awarded the Crystal Eagle plaque (along with Jimmy Doolittle and Chuck Yeager, two of America's most famous fliers), and his restored Curtis JN-4 ("Jenny") flew virtually every American and some foreign astronauts out of his Livermore airstrip around the valley.  Plus, get ahold of this -- he wing-walked in the Salinas airshow until he was in his 70;s.

See http://www.flysanjose.com/fl/about/history/nissenplaqufin.pdf for his story.

The grand-daughter Kate is how I got invited to the TEDx conference.  I've known her for thirty years, and she is one of those folk with a Klout index of 70+.  Connected everywhere, as is her husband.  No wonder that Livermore witll have a great TEDx.

more on Workforce Challenges

Well de ja vu, just found an old YouTube video from 2010 at Media X where I had some thoughts on this topic of Workforce Challenge in the 21st century.  No, it was not talking about 'the mood' in Wash DC, nor the ACM Jobs Migration study showing 15 M displaced American workers.

And gawd, I looked like I needed an energy pill or something.  Video is SO unflattering.

But, the points -- not too bad if I do say so.  In other words, I support this message.

See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSFuZDc-7yw

How do blogs work?

How DO blogs work?  I've been asked this by several folk of late, not sure why but maybe they think I have learned something since I seem to keep posting.   Who wants to know?  Well, for starters, all of the entrepreneurs at the Milken conference who were OVER THIRTY-FIVE.  The younger ones seemed to know already (or was it that they didn't yet care?).

And several friends at the Silicon Valley Forum (by the way, this is a group you can join pretty cheaply, and the meetings I've attended to date have been great learning) are sporadically writing something, but getting "no" readership.

How much readership do you get, Charlie?

I stammered....  "well, the best one (HP Phenom) has run for five years and a month, with 164 posts to date, and a couple hundred responses, but 102,000 page views to date.  These days, it runs about 100 page views a day, lighter on the weekend.  Eight people are signed up as followers, so don't know who the rest are.  It did have two short intervals when viewership peaked at about 1,000 per day (guess when those were, around happy CEO turn-overs).  I've met lots of folk at meetings who say, "I loved your post about ... ", folk I'd never met in person.  So it has a 'modest' readership.  I also get emails a lot from folk -- "well, I didn't want to comment OnLine, but have you thought about...?"  Sometimes they have more gratuitous consulting advice to share, with attention-getting words about parentage, et al.

This blog -- InnovaScapes Institute -- is but 9 weeks old.  With 39 posts already, it has but 2 followers (whoop-de-doo), and no comments online to date.  And until a week ago, virtually no readership.  And then, around the U Penn competition and the Milken Foundation, about 100 page views for two posts, and this week, an 'old' post from April 3rd, about "Challenge to America's Workforce" has drawn 400 page views in two days.  Someone must have seen it, liked it, sent it on, and even tweeted about it -- voila!  So now this blog has 'measureable' readership,  We're approaching fourteen hundred page views at the moment, which is about 36 per post on average, not bad for no advertising or promo.  If you pull out the hot three, there's still about 25 per post for the 'duds' and 170 each for the good ones.

I confessed that I have not sought to build an audience so much as using the blog as a place to jot down interesting things for myself and a few friends.  I've had to separate my disparate interests of late, so now there are four different blogs that I scribble in from time to time.  It is clear that people interested in COPD may not be necessarily interested in For-Profit Schools or in Intrapreneuring, so rather than have an eclectic blog, sometimes FOCUS is good.  Didn't they try to teach me that in seventh-grade English?

I know these numbers won't pull Granny off the proverbial pot, but I suspect 'big numbers' happen sort of the same way.  One post or column catches on (e.g. Tom Friedman), and next thing you know, you have half the country mad at you.  Fame and Klout numbers are just measures, maybe not of anything important.

If you have something to say, maybe you too should consider blogging.  My daughter said two of her siblings 'follow' her.  Oh, incidentally, if you want to read the next budding Erma Bombeck, I indeed am impressed by her writing about 'everyday' life.  See http://www.cynthianooney.com for the blog about "Everything I wanted was on Back Order".  Let me know -- no, let her know -- if you like it.

Diversion, sorry

Every once in a while, some old thought comes rushing back in.  Jim Collins is one of the foremost management consultants and authors around, and he often gives his mountain climbing zest credit for his 'leadership bent'.  And I am usually amused, but not altogether.  Envy, what?

Anyway, while cleaning up our table tonight after a wonderful late-season Dungeness Crab dinner, I got to thinking about some Sierra climbs when I was (much) younger.  Turns out our new ranch, in Elderwood, CA, is about thirty-five air miles from Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain peak in the lower 48 states.  And I'd been playing with a map of the area all day, trying to learn the sizes and spatial layout of some 55 incorporated towns and 127 unincorpaoted areas in Tulare County, which is one of California's smaller counties with less than 500,000 people.

And my old climbs of Mount Irvine, Mallory, and McAdie on the Pacific Crest trail came back as great memories.  I Google'd 'em, and here's what I found re Mount Irvine:

Mount Irvine (13,770 feet)

West Face: Class 2-3.  First ascent 1957 by Charles House.  Ascend the fourth chute south of Consultation Lake.  Be forewarned: As a descent route, this chute is impossible to find from the summit of Mount Irvine.

found at:  http://books.google.com/books?id=u0sc6cgA1IUC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=mount+irvine+sierra&source=bl&ots=nR6XsbX6pG&sig=CPo3NBY7prfIyMeywM92x2SwYW4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0A2TUeSmLeXDigKV-YDYBQ&ved=0CHYQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=mount%20irvine%20sierra&f=false

SV forum on Game Changing Technology

Hosted at Microsoft Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and sponsored by IBM and Nokia, a couple hundred of us crowded in to hear this great set of panels and speakers on Game Changing Technlogies today, organized by that great "meet-up" group, SV Forum.  Today's organizers were Bernard Golden (who worked for me at Informix a mere twenty years ago and is today a key blogger for CIO Magazine), John Murray from SRI International, and Geoffrey Doyle from Percipient Capital.

Wow, what a great day!  Dr. Jeff Weiser, head of IBM's Advanced Research Center keynoted, ahead of a 3D Printing panel, then the CEO of BOX described how they've gone to $1B revenue in three years from a standing start, and then Golden chaired a panel of three VCs, including original investors in Skype, Box, DocuSign, and scores of others.  Golden said as of last Monday, his own business card had changed, since Dell bought their Enterprise Cloud Services company over the weekend.

Paul Saffo, my great Futurist buddy, saw me in the audience, and stopped the room with his opening, "Chuck, I thought this was an exclusive event!" which caused lots of folk to say, "you know him from somewhere?"  We've worked together for thirty years, and he still proudly lists his Distinguished Visiting Fellow title with Media X that I bestowed five years ago (ironic, that is now my title there too)

A quick summary -- Paul said, and it echoed through the day:  Identify Driving Forces, Look for Cross-Impacts, Cherish Failure (especially if is someone else's), and know that Indicators Precede Inflections --> all of this says "EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY" and boy, do we have it today

Playing that against the Milken final panel advice is constructive -- they said they look for teams which have A GREAT IDEA that fills a need and can scale; for teams that are in fact a team and can execute; they look for passion, enthusiasm, and importantly, perseverance; and they look for monetizing evidence (ie. someone will in fact pay for it)

What a privilege I've had these past few days to attend these groups!

Questions?  Happy to address them

U Penn / Milken AspirEdu follow-up

The plane ride home was anticlimactic.  And the fact that I was tired, tuckered out really, was probably evident to the airline stewardess who reacted to my frantic call from the parking lot  and she fortuitously found my car keys in the airline seat.  Lucky at that, though it added an hour to the post-landing.

The competitions and the judging and the reviews later, and the keynotes and the panels and the hoopla, plus of course the obligatory dinners and cocktails and the drenching rain yesterday morning all added to the fun and the exhaustion.  I hate to admit it, but I must be aging (slightly)....

So, postscripts -- look for a new company, AspirEdu -- which I sketched in the last post.  They are building a great little app for helping For-Profit Schools predict and track "at-risk" students based on proprietary algorithms and a decade of work in the field by the founder, Kimberly Munzo.  They have actual paying customers, and just today Canvas (one of the best LMS's in the crowded field) announced a "Certified Partnership" with AspirEdu.  See http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases-test/aspiredu-attains-certified-partner-status-with-canvas-by-instructure-206764321.html

I'm not sure how many of you track the Education Software field, or the For-Profit higher-education field, or the OnLine Education field, but it is just in turmoil.  I spent today at the SV Forum (that is a great group of about 2800 'members' who have weekly programs about Silicon Valley ventures).  Our meeting today was titled "Game Changing Technology" and education figured prominently in the sidebar discussions.   I'll report on it in the next post, but here all I want to say is that any one of these three arenas -- Ed Software, Ed For-Profits, and Ed OnLine -- is 'on fire' for somewhat related reasons.

A quick sketch of the issue re For-Profits (FPs).  These are now 1,000 secondary For-Profit schools in America, most of them with OnLine programs.  The basic issue is what kind of education is being delivered; the concern is that the FPs basically spend lots of money on recruiting (with inflated promises and payola for the recruiters) and exorbitant executive (admin) salaries, while cheating on faculty costs, and the student graduates are seldom skilled enough to land a decent job in their chosen field of study.  The Harkin congressional report of last year was scathing, as are the repeated stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).

Of thirty 'universities' studied by the Harkin team, on average the CEO's made $7M per year from  salary, bonus and stock options, vs. one-tenth that for Ivy League and Big Ten presidents.  CHE found that 27 of the top thirty paying jobs in Education in America, all over $1M per year, were at FPs, matched in #28 spot by Ohio State's football coach as I recall.   Yet FPs only were 6% of America's secondary school students.  Where does the money come from?  From federal student aid, 41% of which went to FP students.  Lessee now, the feds are financing the CEO salaries?  Yup.

The Feds reacted to this by imposing 'new rules' about Mandatory Attendance (believing, more-or-less rightly, that there is correlation between class attendance and successful course completion), about student debt loads, and about student retention (must be 70% of the entering class graduates within 6 years) and even Gainful Employment, although the FP lobby in Washington DC was able to get this last order put on indefinite hold (the Feds shouldn't be making up 'states' rights issues, etc.).

This is an abbreviated assessment, but it is important to note that 'regular colleges' don't have to meet any of these rules even if they have federal loans to their students (and my undergraduate and graduate schools did NOT have a 70% retention policy in place; in fact, they took pride in noting that 'look to your left and to your right -- two of you won't graduate here').   It gets worse for OnLine -- the exciting new MOOCs (Massive Open OnLine Courses) that have made such news this past 18 months, typically have completion rates in the 5% to 15% range, not 70%.  But since they're 'free', no Federal intervention.... even as it raises big questions.

OnLine courses are harder to generate and maintain interest -- buddy systems are harder, the professor's charisma is harder to transmit, the help when you're stuck is scarce, motivation gets robbed by daily routines and crises, etc.

It is against this backdrop that AspirEdu plays.  And they have impressed the Canvas folk, who for my taste are easily the best of the current LMS crop (users seem to agree --  a relatively impartial set of evaluations I've seen by a sample set of 200 schools using the 'top five' LMSs gave them far and away the highest marks).  So, you read it here first about AspirEdu -- check 'em out!

No, I'm not on their board, nor an investor.  Just an interested and intrigued observer, seeing a product that my last gig, as Chancellor of Cogswell College, would find indispensable.

UPenn and Milken Institute

InnovaScapes Institute had the good fortune (me, actually) to be a raconteur for the U Penn Education Business Plan competition today and tomorrow.   This is the wind-up of 220 business plans submitted for consideration for several funding prizes for education ventures.  Ten fledgling companies talked today, for a panel of judges, in front of perhaps thirty erstwhile funders and a few successful entrepreneurs.

The ideas were solid, some even inspired from my standpoint, and the presenters were enthusiastic if not always polished.  Of the ten, I would say five have a good chance of possible traction and scaling.

Betsy Corcoran (EdSurge) was the emcee for the day, and Bobbi Kurshan was the driving force for the GSE (Grad School of Education) at Penn.  Gregory Milken from the Milken Foundation funded two prizes, and several other prizes will be announced tomorrow as well.

The themes would not surprise anyone in terms of needs for students, faculty, or administrators, but the implementations might.  Proprietary algorithms for automatically determining a Student Risk Factor for OnLine course completion, developed by an ex-employee of a For-Profit School that had its Accreditation challenged due to high drop-out rates, is one of my favorites.

This is a huge challenge to For-Profit administrators, partially because they often dredge the bottom of the barrel to grab new students, students whose motivation, competence, or life situation might be at best tenuous.  I asked them if they had an approach for predictive success for the admissions office, and the knowing smile said a lot.

Another skirts the question of accreditation, offering instead a smorgasbord approach to selecting courses from a variety of places to learn job skills that fit an industry -- arguing that content aggregators, content providers, and career search platforms all have a narrow slice compared to this student-focused perspective developed with key employers of a region or topical area.

A third believes in Narrative, and building a great documentary film around it, as the ideal Learning Experience, but finds that Film Producers are needed to transmit the requisite skills compared to most teachers -- the proposal includes a way to build Film Producer Kits, to get more folk engaged.  Hummn...

The entire day was spent without anyone really addressing whether or how MOOCs might affect the education space, which is SHARP contrast to last week's equivalent New School Ventures conference in San Francisco, hosted by Joanne Weiss from Washington DC

Does make you wonder if the West Coast and the East Coast read different messages...

Galileo had a tough job also

At COFES, we had a stimulating evening twenty miles out in the desert from downtown Phoenix, amongst giant saguaro cactus and a few scraggly sagebrush, for a kickback cowboy dinner -- steak, pork 'n beans, corn on the cob (not sure where that comes from for cowboys).  And music, with banjos played by beer-gut cowboys with big hats, alligator boots, and chaps.  Great fun.

And then, outside, there were two telescopes.  One, a 6 inch affair, was trained on Saturn; the other, at 4 inches, on the half-full moon.  The night had intermittent wispy clouds, so the two objects occasionally went out of view, which occasioned a lot of sidebar conversation.

The stimulating one for me was to speculate on Galileo's first thoughts when he saw Saturn's rings.  Did he say, "Whoa, shit, what is THAT?" or words to that effect?  Probably the first human to ever see such a thing, he had to gasp in some surprise, and probably sit down to ponder just what he'd found.

I mean, like, what reference Wikipedia entree could he look under?  And who could he tell?  He was already in the doghouse for all sorts of claims that the Queen found distasteful.  This didn't augur well.

Galileo, among others, had been experimenting with telescopes for some time.  He had found the phases of Venus, effectively overthrowing the Ptolemian system for the Copernican view -- the two raging debates at the time (geocentric vs. heliocentric), he'd described the craters and mountains of the moon in opposition to other learned astronomers of the day, and he'd already found the Milky Way was myriads of stars.  But the rings of Saturn -- he called them "appendages" -- didn't fit anything he'd seen.

He was already in jeopardy for his unorthodox views, though years from the inquisition confrontation.  So his report of the Saturn story was in a letter to the Queen rather than a book, which had been his preferred style.  He of course published the letter, kind of a brochure or monograph if you will.   Skirting the issue, some might say.

Forty years after his original works, eight years after the Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life, he did the opus scientific work that, much later, Einstein would say "puts him in first place" among theoretical physicists.

Being first is sometimes awkward

Changing COPD opinion

Well, a quick draft is done!  Call or email me if you're interested!  I call it "Here's Johnny" in reference to the 2005 death of Johnny Carson from emphysema, one of the deadly forms of COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Examining multiple years of state maps from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, it is clear to me that something is going on with COPD that is quite at odds with the 'storyline' from the American Medical Association about the cause of this remarkably 'silent killer'.

It is NOT smoking for 90% of the cases, as the AMA has asserted for 50 years.  Twenty-two of America's 50 states are "out of order" in terms of a correlation analysis.  The Number 1, 2, and 3 states for COPD death-rate are respectively 33, 34, and 39th in smoking prevalence.   The top ten in smoking prevalence are, on average in the 20's, some as low as 38th, in COPD death-rate, age adjusted.

What is the cause then?  Well, it could be a variety of things (and most likely is).  My favoritie hypothesis is that inert sub-micron particulate matter -- fly ash from coal-fired power plants for example -- in a toxic moecular atmosphere that is ground-hugging on too many occasions -- is much more deadly than smoking, for lower respiratory diseases apart from lung cancer.  Lung cancer is inarguably traceable to cigarette smoking, although for many years the tobacco industry was able to insist otherwise without so much as a snicker in public.

What conditions promote these COPD conditions?  Well, valleys surrounded by mountains (e.g. Vail, CO) are more difficult envirnoments than smoggy Denver, for example.  Los Angeles, with the highest valley to peak elevation change on the leeward side of prevailing winds, is notable.  Fly ash comes in huge quantities from coal-fired power plants, which Los Angeles adroitly moved outside its air basin.  Denver has a high valley to peak ratio if you look west, but not to the east, and the prevailing winds blow the noxious air out rather than trap it.  Salt Lake is more like Los Angeles in that regard.

This is a radical hypothesis.  It to date is unproven, mostly untested.  But it fits the data on the CDC charts far better than the CDC explanation, at least to my eye.

As is true for any differing opinion, the hard part is not developing it, it is 'selling it.'  Marketing ideas to an opinionated audience is non-trivial, a situation faced by many entrepreneurs daily.

Great fun

Hard to change an opinion

Opinion or prejudice or paradigm view -- are they the same, or at least related?

That question dogs anyone who has ever tried to 'buck the system' -- which includes most entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs.  It clouds my efforts to open the discussion for COPD beyond a simple assertion by the entire AMA and American Lung Association that COPD is almost entirely a smoker's disease.

John Doyle, Hewlett-Packard's philosopher/executive for many years (1957-91), once said he approached Bill Hewlett on occasion as "if I wanted to change his mind on something, it helped to focus on ONE thing, over ONE YEAR."  And if, in a year, he could change Hewlett's belief, and hence supportive action, on one thing, he felt successful.  One person, trying to move one other.

It takes longer to move a community, and even longer to move a society.

We might do well to view the NRA dysfunctional meeting this week against that backdrop.

Consider: Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California in 2008, created an incredible unintended backlash across America, not only reaching the Supreme Court but into numerous state legislatures and even into that bastion of frozen minds, the U.S. Congress.  The net result, a scant five years later (in political terms, pretty quickly), Prop 8 is about to be thrown out, and multiple states have enacted GLBT protection that would have been unthinkable when the Tea Partiers came to power in 2010.

Sarah Palin, still a very photogenic figure, lent her support to the NRA convention yesterday, emotionally decrying the use of EMOTION of all things, by Obama and others who got 'carried away' by the tragedies of Sandy Hook and Denver and Gabby Gifford's rally to try to force irresponsible actions on the freedom-loving and respectful NRA members and officials, who after all, are decent law-abiding dedicated civil servants simply affirming American freedom ideals.  What sophistry!

Rhetorically, would Doyle have tried to change her mind?  No.  Would he have focused on changing the core of that opinion?  Yes.  The difference, it seems to me, is that prejudice on someone's part, voiced as opinion (whether vociferously or not), really stems usually from a paradigm view that is larger in context than the issue under debate.   The prejudice "we" sense is because their "opinion" differs radically from ours, on an issue of some visible importance.  The paradigm in which that opinion or prejudice resides is usually amorphous, inexplicit, and not articulated well or at all.

The 'miracle' that happens sometimes when these issues erupt into public rancor is that the bigger issue gets laid bare, and a series of connections become more clear to a wide group.  LGBT rights in general are bigger than just Gay Marriage rights -- including for example all-important medical coverage in this day of soaring medical costs.  And, as such, it swept up a coterie of 'bystanders' who implicitly were not for Gay Marriage but were not activists whatsoever into having to make a stand for or against their own family members in many cases.  Just got tougher to be a reactionary, for the likes of Republican Senator Ron Portman of Ohio.  Bully for him that he came out on his son's side.  Shame on him for waiting so many years.  But... and it is an important 'but' -- he did it once he realized his core beliefs about people's liberty and pursuit of happiness were being compromised by his stances.  He had to reconcile, in other words, his paradigm of American values with this switch in position on a specific issue.  Too bad his fellow Republicans are still struggling.  Not easy, these public positions.