Endless Knots

Roz Zinn, 85: A death in the neighborhood

A beautiful tribute by Bryan Marquard this morning in the Boston Globe to Roz Zinn, who died May 14 here in Newton, where she lived with her husband, Howard. Painter (click for one of her paintings), activist, native of Brooklyn, social worker, actor, mother/wife/grandmother/sister, and first reader of her husband's books, I knew her from the grocery store. One of those unfathomable things: more often than not when I shopped, they were there too, the very tall husband and the very short wife, both darting around the store. Always made me happy to see them - and probably everyone else in the market too. Occasionally we talked, more often we smiled back-and-forth. Tiny gifts of pleasure. Heart aching for Howard, the whole family, and especially Myla and Jonny. Here are the opening paragraphs of the Globe piece:

The dunes overlooking Wellfleet's shore, a terrain Roslyn Zinn revered during summer visits, glow in one of her paintings with a singular warmth, as if she perceived the landscape more deeply than any seasonal pilgrim.

"After years as a teacher and social worker, I turned seriously to painting, which throughout my life had sparked and enlivened my spirit," Ms. Zinn wrote in a brief introduction to "Painting Life," a collection of her work that was published last year, a few months after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. "What I see in the world, so burdened and troubled, and yet beautiful in nature and in the human form, impels me to seek to create images that give the possibility of hope."

A glorious spray of tulips, the gentle curve of an unclothed hip, the deep smile lines etched around her husband's mouth - Ms. Zinn's brush found in each of her subjects a sense of serenity and promise. And those same qualities, present in her along with a radiant delight in life, impressed those she met her during her long marriage to historian Howard Zinn as they walked arm in arm in marches protesting wars from Vietnam to Iraq.

Continue reading Globe piece, "Roslyn Zinn, 85; blended social activisim with the arts."

"Oh, hi, Ted"

Like everyone else in Massachusetts (and many elsewhere), I'm thinking about Senator Kennedy and the fragmentary anecdotes that his name evokes. I keep thinking about this one "common man" story from my very dear friend, K, whose hubby, B, used to field calls from the high and mighty on a regular basis. One time they were here for dinner and the mayor of Boston called looking for him. The incident I'm thinking of didn't involve my phone but it did involve K and B's. B was not home when the phone rang; K answered. "Hi," the man said, "this is Ted Kennedy. Is B there?" "Oh, hi, Ted," K said, not realizing in that split second who it was, then became quite flustered at her lack of respect. She muttered about, explaining that B wasn't there. "Ted" wasn't the least bit flustered. "Well, K, tell him to call anytime up to 9 PM," he said. "Vicki and I turn off the phone in the bedroom and we won't hear it." Sweet and normal. I hope the treatments are not too onerous and that all who love him have the chance to express their love wildly and completely.

Margaret Fullerenes - The Film - Friday, May 23

Delighted to share this good news: filmmakers Ron Mortara and Kim Romano will join our Margaret Fuller birthday gathering at Mount Auburn Cemetery this coming Friday, May 23 (meet inside front gates at 8 AM, then proceed to the Fuller lot on Pyrola Path).

Ron will film, Kim (check out the trailer for her film Muriel) will do sound. "We" [she smiles toward Ron] plan to make a very short film about this gathering. The "script" goes something like this: We'll take a quick tour of the Fuller graves, I'll read from Fuller's work, anyone moved to speak will do so, and we'll end with John Halamka playing a mourning song on his Shakuhachi (Japanese flute).

I had the chance to work with Ron three years ago on his film, The Beat. Ron used his knowledge as an ex-neurosurgeon for this imaginative piece in which a scientist discovers that the same part of the brain that recognizes rhythm is responsible for violence. In the film, I played the scientist's artist-wife. We filmed in my friend Emily's painting studio. Here's Ron on the set of The Beat.

For those who love water, whales, sailboats, and beautiful essays, you must see Ron's short, HUNGER ANGER LOVE PLAY, his meditation on what a whale might be thinking.

Local readers and those in Boston this Friday, please, all welcome to join.

"If social networks were like cars"

Nova Spivack (search on his name here for more of my posts mentioning him) has a thoughtful post about the proliferation of social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), positing that we join the ones with brands most appealing to us - while noting that he belongs to most of them as do his friends. (Me, I wouldn't say most but I do belong to more than one.) See "If social networks were like cars."

danah boyd has been writing about this for some time as part of her research on how the young 'uns are taking to the web, with distinct preferences for which social network they join based on class, ethnicity, and the like. And, no, that's not a typo. danah is lower case all the time. This post on "Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics" links to her recent talk for the MacArthur Foundation, and hits the high points of her research. Very interesting and mandatory reading for those of us following the complexities of the online world.

Lilacs

 

Uniting the Virtual Workforce

I'm waiting for my copy of Uniting the Virtual Workforce by Karen Sobel Lojeski and Richard R. Reilly to arrive so can't give a first-hand review yet but Rachael King does a nice job teasing out what's helpful here in Business Week's "How Virtual Teams Can Succeed." Here's a representative paragraph from King's review:

The authors coin a term, "virtual distance," to refer to the feelings of separation engendered by communicating by e-mail, instant messaging, audio conferencing, and other tools. If you've ever had a misunderstanding with a colleague via e-mail, you've experienced virtual distance. But more than just making people feel bad, the authors say, this virtual distance can be a serious problem that inhibits collaboration, impedes innovation, diminishes employee satisfaction, and hurts the bottom line.

I like it. Also like the authors' summary of a global infrastructure project run by Karan Sorensen, chief information officer for Johnson & Johnson's pharmaceutical research & development. Sorensen brought people together face-to-face at the beginning, which is also how Volvo IT launched its global SAP and its global infrastructure programs. (The research from our Harvard Business Review study said otherwise; at least among our sample of 54 teams, this initial face-to-face was not regarded as necessary.) From there on I agree that J&J's virtual team got it just right:

Early on, they set up rules of engagement, such as how each individual liked to communicate best, to address cultural differences. On conference calls, the staff kept photos of everyone by the phone, and Sorensen made sure to alternate call times so that certain people weren't always stuck dialing in at midnight. By getting her team to collaborate better, Sorensen completed the project under budget and well ahead of deadline, saving J&J more than $200 million over three years.

Worth the read. Here's the link again.

Champions of Freedom (House) 2008

Freedom House, which will be sixty next year, names "Champions of Freedom" each Spring. We celebrated last Thursday night here in Boston.

Pam Cross served as Mistress of Ceremonies,
here with her hubby, Ron Ancrum

THE ENVELOPE PLEASE

David Goodman (middle) received  a special award in honor of his mother, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, who, in 2002 was the first recipient of the Freedom House History Maker Award. Cynthia Bell (left) and Sarah Cleto Rial (right) accepted the History Maker Award on behalf of My Sister's Keeper. 

Paul Grogan accepted the History Maker Award on behalf of The Boston Foundation, where he serves as Pres and CEO

Dr. J. Keith Motley, Chancellor, UMass Boston, received the Ellen S. Jackson Award for Excellence in Education, as did the Boston School Reform Initiative.

And Richard Mintz, who worked with Freedom House founders Otto and Murial Snowden, accepted the Adrienne Williams Spellman Diversity Award on behalf of Mintz Levin.

And here are Freedom House Chair Emeritus, Gail Snowden, whose parents founded Freedom House, with her daughter, Lee Snowden Trimmier

 

Work Green, Work Virtually at Enterprise 2.0

And, careful readers, here's the last session we're involved with at Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston, week of June 9-12. Should be a lot of fun. Stick your most green stories in your Web 2.0 backpack and  share them with the early birds (8 am, Westin Waterfront):

Work Green, Work Virtually

Suddenly, in the past year or so, companies around the world are turning the mirror on themselves and trying to calculate the true cost of their doing business, including their environmental impact. For the first time, Enterprise 2.0 has published a green policy regarding conference materials. Collaboration, when extended to all aspects of the enterprise, can have a dramatic impact on reducing carbon footprint. Come share your stories and learn about what other organizations are doing to amp up their collaborative activities while tamping down their effect on the environment.

Date: 6/11/2008
Time: 8:00 AM
Room: Griffin

"When face time is a matter of life and death"

I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago when someone made the most powerful argument I've ever heard for virtual working: having to travel through armed conflict to get to a meeting. For those of us lucky enough not to be in war zones (I've lost track of how many wars are going on around the world - last I checked it was something like 50), we don't have to consider taking our lives in our hands when we go to a meeting. It got me thinking and I ended up writing "When face time is a matter of life and death" for The Industry Standard. I linked it back to the discussion we've had here on green teams. Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Many people have been killed going to meetings in Iraq.” It was an offhand remark made by a US military advisor in a casual conversation about virtual work -- its benefits, its pitfalls, its resisters, its committed participants. Until that moment, it had never before crossed my mind that traveling to a face-to-face meeting could be lethal.

Turns out Army commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken measures to reduce travel. “One of the first things I did here was set up a collaborative network to offset the fact that we couldn't travel easily or safely," Lieutenant General Jim Dubik explained in an email to me. "Needless to say, doing so contributed hugely to the coordination of our work.” Dubik is Commanding General of Multinational Security Transition-Iraq. Dubik’s work follows a decade-long history of Web 2.0 and other media experimentation in the US Army (see The Social General)...

Continue reading my Industry Standard article here.

 

Book Launch 2.0: "My blog. I'm guessing no one reads it"

Struggling and/or successful authors, bloggers, and anyone else trying to get the word out about what they're doing, ahoy. This video by Dennis Cass pretty much summarizes what it means to be lost in today's world. Make that Today 2.0.

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...at Enterprise 2.0

Coming to Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston in a few weeks? If so, please let me know and please come to our sessions. I'm involved with three, including this one, which I'm sharing with, guess who, Jeff Stamps, and is about, guess what, virtual teams current and future:

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...

Virtual teams have always been in the 2.0 world, adding content to their shared online spaces, carrying on conversations after the lights have gone out, trying out new media. But the explosion of 2.0 technologies - and the advent of a generation that knows more about how to work online than their bosses - has altered (and will continue) to alter the virtual team landscape. What are the simple ideas that can slice through the complexity facing virtual teams? How can they easily form networks? How can they navigate among the multiple organizations that they serve? Hear the latest from the people who coined the term "virtual teams."

Date: 6/12/2008
Time: 10:45 AM
Room: Carlton

April '08 book club: Old School

Oooops, forgive me. I missed the post on Old School by Tobias Wolff, the pick of the Fiction Book Club for April. I have an excuse. I couldn't attend due to work-related travel - not even a vacation. The group, I am told, liked the book very much, as did I, if only because it takes place in my hometown. I recognized the school (The Hill School, then a private boys' school educating the likes of James Baker, a 1948 alum and this year's graduation speaker), the "village" (Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a borough in actuality), and even the picture on the cover of The Hill School dining hall, where I first ate broccoli with hollandaise sauce. My friend, Mary Hartman, lived at The Hill because her father taught there.

Wolff's book is about belonging and authenticity and how simple smudgings of the truth can result in massive consequences. That the book is also about three authors and about students as writers made it even more appealing. The writers in question were "names" who visit the school for the annual lecture, having chosen in advance the work of one student to celebrate: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. The send-up of Rand is hilarious and refreshing, given how truly venal Rand's view of humanity is. The appearance or lack thereof of Hemingway is the trope around which the story unwinds. Good stuff. Well done, Mr. Wolff. I bet we passed each other on High Street when you went off-campus and perhaps you were even at the dance where I wore my first black velvet gown.

Exactly like a fox

This post requires a picture but alas the camera was elsewhere at the proper moment. When the subject and the object come together, I shall definitely post. Meanwhile, back at the homestead, we were leaving our house last night, getting as far as the driveway, when a reddish, longish, thinnish, canine-ish being crossed in front of us, scurried to the shed in the sideyard, then began digging like a maniac. A fox! A really beautiful fox, who then disappeared around the back of the shed and stuck its pretty little head around the side, looked at us, then went back to digging, evaporating into the hole under the shed.

Sighting the fox is either a good omen or a terrible one, according to an exhaustive Internet search (not). But it sure is pretty. Wish me luck in snapping a picture. A neighbor reported seeing the same animal in our yard a few weeks ago and witnessed a stand-off between it/s/he and Sola, our beautiful granddog.

Washing and drying your bluetooth earpiece

"It's not a good idea," says my friend Rich. He, Mr. Technology to those who know him as one of the early movers and shakers in the Boston area, has been having trouble with his cell phone, which led us to a conversation earlier today about various encounters between phones (and their accoutrements) and water. I know.

I happened to drop my Blackberry in a body of water recently. (No further details will be provided.) But it did provide some solace to Rich, who keeps his earpiece in his sweatshirt, which on occasion, requires a trip to his washer and dryer. And thus...he's out an earpiece. So next time, check the pockets. And keep your cell phone out of your sweatshirt pockets altogether. I know.

Happy Mother's Day 2008

What do I love about Mother's Day? The lilacs, with hearts for leaves, are always in bloom where we live.

The most influential people in IT

Delighted to find my friend John Halamka named #31 among eWeek's "The 100 Most Influential People in IT." He also plays a mean Japanese flute as per below. And at #38, my Facebook friend Andrew McAfee, who invented the term "Enterprise 2.0." And (I'm still going down the list), my friend Tom Davenport (#70), whose thinking keeps knocking down shibboleths; the intrepid Mass congressman, Ed Markey (#73), who was worrying about the Internet before most people puzzled over whether to capitalize the word or not (see this press release from our MassNet inaugural event in 1995 that he keynoted); Ross Mayfield (#74), co-founder of Social Text and a virtual friend; and Good to Great, etc. author Jim Collins (#87), whom we once shared the podium with at a Royal Dutch Shell Scenario event. Way to go, guys. Proving again that it's good to be a friend of mine - just kidding, just kidding....

Email is obsolete

Really? According to Bombay's Business Standard, "'Obsolete tools' like e-mail and instant messengers could act as roadblocks for the growth of web collaboration, say experts." Experts cited in this article come from some technology companies purveying different gadgets for getting along online so reader beware. Still, this notion that email is on its way out (first time I've heard it applied to IM, though) continues to pop up in odd places...not including the enthusiastic email defender I recently encountered in a workshop.

"Getting to We"

Very good article on collaboration with a fresh perspective in Communications of the ACM. "Getting to We" by Peter J. Denning and Peter Yaholkovsky gets the focus off collaboration technology and back onto process, where it belongs. The authors start off on the right foot (and thanks to ShiftMode and Mark Roseman for the crumbs leading back to this feast):

Messes are large, complex, seemingly intractable situations that no one can find a way out of. The most tangled messes are called "wicked problems" because people can't even agree on what the problem is and because the solution will almost surely entail a disruptive innovation. Collaboration is essential for resolving messes.

They go on to talk about the clash between top-down and grassroots approaches to clear paths through the wicked problems, quickly dispense with the idea that technology will a priori make things less wicked, then go on to propose a simple five-stage collaboration model that makes sense to me. Besides, it builds on  David Cooperrider's work in Appreciative Inquiry, David Straus's collaboration "Method," and Charrettes, the intensive workshop process associated with architects and used far more broadly. (Disclosure: Both Davids are friends.) Five steps from "Getting to We:"

1. Declare. Someone states that there's a problem and the group agrees that something needs to be done.
2. Connect. This is the moment for the long hello as people working on the problem get to know one another and let on to their fears and dreams.
3. Listen and learn. Open-mindedness and open-earedness reign here. Possibly the toughest part of collaboration, in my experience.
4. Allow "we" to develop. Worth direct quote here: "The mess may start to unravel as the members become aware of and take care of their interlocking concerns. Occasionally, the mess will evaporate in the light of the reconfigured concerns of 'we'."
5. Create together. The fun part.

What disease is a cousin of yours?

Fascinating article in today's NY Times, "Redefining disease, genes and all," with a chart called "Mapping the human diseaseome" that looks a lot like OrgScope, which I've posted about here, here, and here (search "OrgScope" on right for full listing).

Gene research is causing medicine to reclassify. Turns out that seemingly unrelated diseases share some number of genes. Definitely worth reading and definitely worth playing with the map in which Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, has had a hand. The map assigns a color to each disease and a size to its "wafer," indicating how many genes that disease contains. Then it draws lines to other diseases that share genes with it. Implications are far-reaching and possibly even paradigm changing for how we treat disease. From the article:

Duchenne muscular dystrophy may not seem to have much in common with heart attacks. One is a rare inherited disease that primarily strikes boys. The other is a common cause of death in both men and women. To Atul J. Butte, they are surprisingly similar.

Dr. Butte, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, is among a growing band of researchers trying to redefine how diseases are classified — by looking not at their symptoms or physiological measurements, but at their genetic underpinnings. It turns out that a similar set of genes is active in boys with Duchenne and adults who have heart attacks.

Help wanted: Chief Blogging Officer

To the burgeoning bureaucracy of chiefs add this one, from workforce.com: "Chief Blogging Officer Title Catching On in Corporations:"

For better or worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.

... Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications and blogger at the Buzz Bin, [said]: “The problem is that too many people focus on the actual tool: the blog,” he said. “What they need to focus on is the principles behind social media that make it work—like participating in a larger community works, and not controlling the conversation works.”