BadskiBlog

Sustainability & The Military: Parallels Between Two Worlds

2012-01-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

Since my departure from the Air Force I have had to try and explain to family, friends, and acquaintances what exactly it is that I am doing now. When I explain that I took a role within a start up Portland-based consulting firm called The Gunter Group people can generally follow along. However, when I get into the details of the client and division I work in I often lose people.

I was lucky enough to have Nike as my first client in the consulting arena. It is a company that I have an immense amount of respect for not only due to the fact they are a leader in the athletic apparel arena, but because that have been a shining star company that continually innovates over time. Of course there is a coolness factor that is associated with Nike, it's products, and it's marketing and at the risk of sounding cliche' that attitude transcends throughout the World Headquarters campus. But it is the innovation piece that I am more closely aligned with in my current role and that is the part of my Nike experience that I find most engaging. It has been a great experience and I really have enjoyed my time at Nike so far.

Not only was I lucky to get Nike as a client but I was also lucky to get on within a unique division of Nike. I work in the Sustainable Business & Innovation (SB&I) division of Nike which in in its simplest form is a bit like a 'green incubator' for Nike. SB&I seeks to innovate and integrate enterprise level sustainability solutions into the Nike business model while mobilizing key external stakeholders to make industry change.

The first question I usually get is, "what do you consult?" The answer is pretty straightforward in that I provide project management support within SB&I. In short, I help to get things done. Execution.

The second question I almost always get is, "what the hell do you know about sustainability?" To be quite honest, when I started I doubt I knew much more than the average college educated Gen Y-er does about sustainability. I had a basic understanding of the concepts surrounding sustainability that were mostly garnered through osmosis in a variety life experiences. That understanding wasn't very deep and it came accompanied with limited context.

However, having been a part of the division for the better part of four months I may have sold myself short a bit regarding what I knew about sustainability. Although I wasn't formally educated in sustainability concepts and I most certainly had never served in a role within that context before, I came from a background that shares a surprisingly large number of parallels with the sustainability world.....the military. What do sustainability and the military environments have in common?

Systemic Challenges - One thing that I learned in the military is how to operate in challenging and ambiguous environments. Throughout my career and most notably while serving in Iraq, I encountered challenges that did not have a textbook answer. There was not a clear cut best solution...or a solution at all for that matter. There were too many unknowns, too many interests, too many interconnected subsets, and too little time to easily solve problems. In the military you are forced to confront challenges that are spread and interwoven throughout a complex system. In my relatively short stint in the sustainability realm I see the same type of systemic challenges represented.

Execution - I have discussed on BadskiBlog before that execution is everything. I am, admittedly, probably more of an idea guy by nature. I am energized by strategic thinking and collaborative brainstorming. However, I crafted my ability to get things done in the military and that is something I will always be grateful for. Now I am, in essence, getting paid for my ability to get things done and to serve as a catalyst to help other people get things done. It is a challenge and I am constantly learning but it is exciting and fulfilling as well. A military force that can rapidly work it's way through the planning/decision cycle and execute will have a competitive advantage and will overcome resource constraints to defeat its enemies over time. My sense is that companies will benefit from a similar (albeit less combative) approach to sustainability. Taking sustainability from idea to execution faster that your competitors will become a critical competitive advantage over time.

Leading Change - As an officer in the Air Force I have sat through a few leadership presentations in my day. In fact, my undergrad experience at the Air Force Academy was almost entirely centered around character based leadership. In hindsight, a great number of those sessions drifted into discussions about leading change. The military isn't all about following orders as many like to think. And although as whole the military machine may be categorized as a bludgeoning bureaucracy of sorts, in smaller pockets the most successful units/organizations are all about leading and implementing change. SB&I is all about leading change and I imagine that is consistent throughout the sustainability space. There are a ton of methodologies for leading change (a book review on John Kotter's "The Heart of Change" coming soon) but like anything else academia can only get you so far. It is the organization that can consistently lead change that will prevail in their efforts to implement sustainability or any other initiative for that matter.

Below is a video of Nike's VP of Sustainable Business & Innovation, Hannah Jones, in which she not only provides an excellent overview of what SB&I is all about, but also some of the concepts I discussed above. Definitely do yourself a favor and watch the full video and enjoy Hannah's, very eloquent, discussion on the future of sustainability.

Check out the full video HERE, it is very interesting.

Book Review: Creative Project Management

2011-12-31T10:58:00.000-08:00

Creative Project Management by Michael Dobson was the latest book I plucked from the local library. It was in a similar vein to my last read in that it was all about project management and given my recent career change this should surprise no one.

The book was a solid read and although it took me quite a while to make my way through it, I think that was more attributed to buying and remodeling a home than to the quality of the read. What I really liked about the book was the manner in which it illustrated fairly classic project management concepts. Instead of focusing on a few illustrations and concept diagrams, the book focused on well known (often military) leaders and how they successfully and unsuccessfully implemented project management throughout history. These historical events, viewed through a project management lens, did a lot to show how these concepts can be applied universally to projects instead of sticking with more generic examples of project management like IT implementations.

What I didn't necessarily love about the book was the way in which it dragged out relatively straight forward concepts. It wasn't that the length was the issue it was the fact that some of the concepts went into great storytelling depth with relatively little practical explanation. It almost felt like the second half of the book was filler to get the book to a certain length. Yet, taken in totality the book was a pretty solid.

Throughout the book there were great questions that every project manager should ask themselves and others regarding the project. The author even went so far as to compile these questions as an appendix at the end of the book. These questions are an extremely helpful guide in determining what elements of the project must be developed and at what stage they should be developed in order for the project to be successful. I enjoyed the way the author built the appendix so much that I copied the pages and plan on using them to help develop each stage of the projects that I manage. If anything, the book is worth picking up for that reason alone.

Notes:

Chapter 1 - Why Do 70% of Projects Fail:
- 32% of projects were delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features and functions
- 44% were finished either late, over budget, or only partially completed
- 24% failed altogether, and they were cancelled or abandoned
- Two reasons projects fail: 1. Things that nobody thought of or prepared for 2. Things everybody thought of but no one prepared for
- Four PM questions: 1. Why are we doing this? (Business Case) 2. Who has an interest & what do they want/need? (Human Being Aspect) 3. What do we have to do & how? (Project Management, Planning, Qualitative) 4. Who needs to be involved & in what way? (Top Management & Other Involvement)
- Embrace the uncertainty & fluidity of the projects you manage
- What makes this project hard? (chart pg 13) 1. Constraints - How tight are time, cost, performance? 2. Complexity - Tasks, resources, technology 3. Certainty - How much do we know about risks & issues?
- Risk = Probability X Impact
- Cognitive biases pg 18
- When work is temporary & unique the unique part guarantees the presence of uncertainty
- 2 ways of learning: 1. Have an experience and learn from it 2. Learn from someone else's experience (The second it cheaper!)

Chapter 2 - What We Know & What We Think:
- PMs are supposed to challenge assumptions whenever possible but we all have blind spots, biases, & perceptual errors that keep us from recognizing our own misjudgments
- Johari's Window test pg 28
- More PM questions: 1. What aren't we seeing correctly or at all? 2. How will people react to this project? 3. What if I'm wrong? 4. What am I not seeing?
- Ignaz Semmelweis hand washing theory pg 31
- Vietnam quote "Anybody who thinks he knows what's going on clearly doesn't understand the situation."
- Sewell Avery & General Patton project management stories
- "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown" - Carl Sagan

Chapter 3 - The Most Dangerous Word is a Premature Yes:
- "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected; therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, Washington DC 1957
- First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain." Your first understanding of the mountain is an outline, a shape in the horizon. As you get closer the mountain decomposes into a million individual details. Finally you know the mountain as a whole. Zen koan.
- No one starts a war - or rather, no on in his senses ought to do so - without being first clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." - Clausewitz
- A project isn't the end its the means to bridge the gap
- The first step in any project is to define the gap
- Eisenhower closing the gap story pg 55
- What is the minimum that can be done now?
- Project triage: 1. Likely to survive no matter what 2. Likely to fail no matter what 3. Projects where the level of effort will make a positive impact in success

Chapter 4 - Good Enough, Barely Adequate, Failure:
- 7 Levels of project outcomes: 1. Perfect 2. Outstanding 3. Exceeds Expectations 4. Fully Satisfactory 5. Barely Adequate 6. Failure 7. Catastrophe

Chapter 5 - When The Project Appears Impossible:
- "If an elderly and distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke
- Just because a project appears to be impossible doesn't mean it is
- Can you adjust time, cost, performance to make it possible?
- Ways to accomplish the impossible project: 1. Change the constraints - analysis, negotiation, problem solving, requirements management 2. Get around the constraints - creativity, exploiting holes, different approaches, rethinking assumptions

Chapter 6 - Knowns & Unknowns: The Risk Factors:
- "The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature." - Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk 1998
- Risk is a proposed future even that would have a significant impact on you or something you care about should it happen. Positive or negative. Above all risk is uncertain.
- Risk -> severity and likelihood
- Pure risk is all downside
- Business risk has upside and downside
- Residual risk is leftover risk after mitigation
- Secondary risk is new risk introduced as a result of solutions to the original risk
- Risk management table & responses pg 134
- Managing knowns & unknowns pg 138
- Six dimensions of project management table pg 149
- Leverage, relax, absorb = triple constraints risk responses

Chapter 7 - Project Intelligence:
- Spies pay attention to their environment
- Intelligence process - Collection, Analysis, Packaging, Dissemination

Chapter 8 - It Takes A Village To Wreck A Project:
- "Normal people believe that if it ain't broke don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." - Scott Adams, cartoonist, creator of Dilbert
- "Want to know if you are a leader? Look back and see if anyone is following." - Marilyn Moats Kennedy
- 4 types of managerial challenges - Martyr, Scapegoat, Hall Monitor, Peon
- 4 types of stakeholders - Positive, negative, tangential, conflicted
- 4 stages of managing stakeholders - Identify, Understand, Maximize, Manage
- There are 3 reasons to communicate: 1. You want someone to do something 2. You want someone to know something 3. You want someone to feel something or some combo of the 3
- Table page 88

Chapter 9 - Framing Change:
- I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions." Wilbur Wright
- Counterfactuals are examinations of what might have happened had an actual even turned out another way. A great way to analyze and cope with change

Chapter 10 - Salvaging Project Value:
- Closeout of a project is often taken for granted
- Closeout: 1. Complete 2. Turned Over 3. Closed Out 4. Value Captured

- Appendix A - Questions For The Creative Project Manager:
- Questions pg 227

What Keeps You Up At Night vs. Imagine A World...

2011-11-13T17:53:00.001-08:00

Last week was probably the most influential week of my short post Air Force career. I don't want to reveal too much about the project I am working on at Nike as we are implementing a pilot that relies heavily on specific timing and stakeholder engagement, but last week was full of meetings with company leadership from around the world. Those meetings required an immense amount of preparation but what really stood out to me was the incredible amount of truly deep thinking that took place. Not only was the process extremely engaging and exciting to be a part of, but it was also full of business and leadership lessons that I will take with me for the long haul.

In one of our meetings I pulled out a couple anecdotes that, at the time, seemed unrelated but in hindsight are definitely connected with regard to how teams tackle strategy, approach problem solving, and drive innovation. The two brainstorming approaches I am referring to are:

"What keeps you up at night," and "Imagine a world."

Both phrases were, by all intents and purposes, brought forth to organize the team's thoughts around very complex problems. Both sought to achieve results. Both phrases can actually be very useful in getting a diverse team to focus on the same critical issues of a challenge.

But what I find most interesting is what differentiates the two approaches.

"What keeps you up at night" can align a team. It can focus the group, most specifically on risk mitigation, while developing solutions to complex problems. And although framing a problem with this statement is undoubtedly better than not steering a team at all, it does have some significant drawbacks. Here are a few I thought of while reflecting on the approach over the past few days.

1. It is reactionary - Framing a problem in this manner has the team reacting to an environment instead of shaping it. Of course there is value in knowing the world you are operating in but in the long run there is only so much value to be gained in risk mitigation.

2. It is a pessimistic lens - How do you mobilize your team? I know I like to lead and to be lead with an eye on what we can possibly accomplish, not on what can possibly go wrong.

3. It doesn't drive you into the unknown - This third point is really a derivative of the first two. How innovative is your team going to be when you are focused on avoiding or minimizing what can go wrong. Sure there are some innovations that are derived from mitigating risk. But when comparing "what keeps you up at night" to "imagine a world" it is easy for me to see which one gets my heart pumping. I think what truly differentiates good enough from great is a truly passionate team and I just can't see people rallying around a focus on what we fear.

Many of the downfalls of the "what keeps you up at night scope" are the very reasons I gravitate towards the "imagine a world" approach.

1. It is proactive - "Imagine a world"elicits goals and a unified vision from the team. It focuses the group on where we are going, not what may be coming at us.

2. It is optimistic - It figures out what the team wants to create without the hindrances of how to get there. Setting the vision without boundaries prevents the team from self eliminating. Once the vision is locked in the team naturally accepts the accountability to get there.

3. It promotes innovative thinking - When you aren't focused on what could go 'wrong' and you are focused on what you want 'right' to look like you will naturally think more creatively.

4. It unifies the team towards a set of goals - Enough said.

These were just a few of the many examples that reinforced to me the importance engaging teams in focused critical thinking. It is very difficult to quantify the benefit focused critical thinking. It is not the type of lesson you would read explicitly in a textbook or within the framework of a management philosophy, however anyone who as ever engaged in the activity while tackling a truly complex problem will undoubtedly see the value. The next time I start a project or a new venture I plan to start with the "imagine a world" construct. I really haven't found a more inspiring way to unify a team around what is truly important in an endeavor.

2011-10-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

Fundamentals of Project Management by James P. Lewis - One thing that I think every athlete learns at a young age is the importance of fundamentals. I have tried to take that important lesson that I learned early in my hockey career and apply it in other aspects of my life. When I found out my first consulting project would be a project management role at Nike, I went to the local library and picked up Fundamentals of Project Management.

The book is relatively short, which I actually really appreciated. Fittingly, a book on fundamentals shouldn't be extremely long and wordy. I think the book does a great job succinctly laying out an overview of the basics of project management. The book not only delved into the classic project management tools and theories but it also covered topics like team engagement, leadership, and organizational culture,

I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who wants to read a good overview of project management or to anyone who wants to learn how they can hone their skills to better deliver projects on time, within budget, and within the desired performance parameters. Below are some of the notes I took while reading this book.

Notes:

Chapter 1: An Overview of Project Management:
- PMI.org
- A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to produce a unique product, service, or result.
- Repetitive =/ project
- Definite time, cost, scope, performance requirements
- "A problem scheduled for solution"
- Rule = people who do the work should plan it
- PM role is that of an enabler
- "Leadership is the art of getting others to want to do something that you believe should be done." - Lance Packard
- C=F(P,T,S)
- Project Life Cycle: Concept, Definition, Planning, Execution, Closeout
- Projects fail at the definition phase
- Steps in managing a project: 1. Define Problem 2. Develop Solution Options 3. Plan the Project 4. Execute the Plan 5. Monitor & Control 6. Close the Project
- 9 Knowledge Areas pg 20

Chapter 2: The Role of the Project Manager:
- The primary role of all PMs is to ensure all work is completed on time, within budget & scope, and at the correct performance levels
- Must understand mission and vision of the organization
- PM is about influencing people
- Scandinavian Airlines Story
- PM has responsibility but authority. Must use leadership and management to accomplish

Chapter 3: Planning the Project:
- Two barriers to good planning: 1. Prevailing Paradigms 2. The Nature of Human Beings
- Control is exercised by comparing where you are to where you are supposed to be so that corrective action can be taken when there is a deviation
- No plan = no control
- To plan you must have strategy, tactics, & logistics
- Project plan is: problem statement - project mission statement - project objectives - project work requirements - exit criteria - end item specifications - WBS - schedules - required resources - control system - major contributors - risk areas
- Planning tips pg 42

Chapter 4: Developing A Mission, Vision, Goals, & Objectives for the Project:
- A problem is a gap
- Vision defines done
- Mission, vision, problem statement chart pg 47
- Mission of every PM is to satisfy the customers needs
- 1. What are we going to do? 2. For whom are we going to do it?
- Objectives: what is our desired outcome? How will we know when we achieve it?
- Risk analysis pg 53

Chapter 5: Using The Work Breakdown Structure:
- WBS developed before schedule
- Break work down to a level sufficient to achieve estimating accuracy
- Assign responsibility for each part
- You cannot give a time/cost estimate without considering who will be performing the task
- Base on historical data
- Beware of Parkinson's law and variation
- List assumptions, +- numbers, things that may skew the estimate

Chapter 6: Scheduling Project Work:
- Critical pat determines the longest series of activities that can't be done in parallel
- Unless resource allocation is handled properly schedules are next to useless
- Schedule at a level you can manage
- Diagram what is possible then deal with resource constraints

Chapter 7: Producing a Workable Schedule:
- Harder to catch up than to stay on target

Chapter 8: Project Control & Evaluation:
- Having authority is no guarantee people will do your bidding. In the end people have to do it willingly
- Give people responsibility & control over what they are supposed to accomplish
- Self control needs 1. Clear definition of goal 2. Personal plan of how to do work 3. Skills & resources 4. Feedback on progress from the work 5. Clear definition of authority to take action & deviate from the plan
- If control systems do not result in action then the system is ineffective
- The simpler the status report the better

Chapter 9: Project Control Using Earned Value Analysis:
- There are only 4 responses to deviation from the plan: 1. Cancel the project 2. Ignore the deviation 3. Take corrective action 4. Revise the plan
- One of the hardest things to do is actually measure progress
- Variance formulas pg 118

Chapter 10: Managing The Project Team:
- Project management tools are necessary but not sufficient
- If you can't manage people you can't manage a project
- Have the team participate in planning to promote teamwork
- Getting the team organized: 1. Define what must be done using WBS, problem definition, etc. 2. Determine staffing requirements 3. Recruit the team 4. Complete your project plan with participation of the team
- Rules for developing commitment pg 138

Chapter 11: How To Make Project Management Work In Your Company:
- Leadership must show interest
- Reward good project management
- Train the team
- Plan small wins for people

Chapter 12: Project Management For Everyone:

- Tools should only be used when they give you an advantage

Checking For Charity 2011

2011-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Checking For Charity recently closed out our books for 2011 and in our third year of existence we continued our upward trend in charitable distributions and in the size and professionalism of our tournament. I am very proud to announce that the 3rd Annual Checking For Charity Tournament distributed nearly $28,000.00 to 20 unique charities! Below are the distributions and charities that were involved in our tournament back in August.

A Division:

Team	Charity	Amount Distributed
Team Badski's Warriors	Homes For Our Troops	$1,008.00
Selects Hockey	Ed Snyder Youth Hockey Foundation	$1,303.40
Lubers	Children's Make A Wish Foundation	$1,008.00
RAI - Team Orner	Alicia Rose "Victorious" Foundation	$1,121.00
Macho Madness	Angels On Earth Foundation	$1,121.00
Pirates	M.A.B. Memorial Foundation	$1,008.00
Dunphy A	Cole McFarland Scholarship	$1,008.00
Newmania	Endometriosis Foundation	$1,419.20

B Division:

Team	Charity	Amount Distributed
Hawks	Preeclampsia Foundation	$1,008.00
Dunphy B	The United Way of Camden County	$1,303.40
Sunday Danglers	Preeclampsia Foundation	$1,121.00
Mt. Laurel Moose	Alicia Rose "Victorious Foundation	$1,008.00
Snyder Hockey Loungers	Ed Snyder Youth Hockey Foundation	$1,008.00
Ice-O-Topes	Greg T Dalesio Memorial Foundation	$1,008.00
Team M.S.	National Multiple Sclerosis Foundation	$1,008.00
Dangle Pies	American Cancer Society	$1,419.20
L.V.I.	Ed Snyder Youth Hockey Foundation	$1,121.00

C Division:

Team	Charity	Amount Distributed
Toad Slam	Breastfest Philly	$1,121.00
Patriots	CHESPA	$1,419.20
N.C. Chiefs	American Heart Association	$1,008.00
Charros	Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation	$1,303.40
Aqua Corp	Aqua Corps	$818.00*
The Boogeymen	Defending The Blueline	$1,008.00
Tele-Q	Children's Cancer Research Center	$1,121.00
NFCA	National Foundation For Celiac Awareness	$1,008.00

I couldn't be happier with how our tournament turned out and with our amazing board. Our continued growth is a testament to their efforts. Our growth has ushered in some new challenges as well and has renewed my focus on making Checking For Charity the best it can be. Below are some thoughts and lessons learned from our third and best event ever.

1. Leadership Still Matters - As you can tell from the content and the frequency of my posts over the last year, my life has been through a lot of ups and downs. The adversity and transitions I endured over the past year undoubted impacted my ability to effectively lead the Checking For Charity movement. When I look at the areas of our tournament that did not go well it is very easy for me to trace those struggles back to a lack of leadership on my part. Not an easy pill to swallow but one that has ultimately renewed my commitment to optimizing and growing Checking For Charity.

2. We Raised The Bar On Everything.....Including Expenses - Growth comes with a cost, and in the last year our cost......was costs! Our tournament was bigger and better in every way. We grew and improved every major metric we track from charitable distributions to teams and divisions in the tournament. Unfortunately our expenses began to increase at a greater rate than the money we raised for charity. That fact tells me two things. First off, it tells me that our model has reached a plateau in terms of the size we can make a single event. Secondly, it tells me that we need to focus less on growing an individual event and more on optimizing what we do well. In short we need to find our sweet spot and work on getting better results with less effort invested.

3. Ethos - Our group thrives on an open and collaborative team environment. We rely on unsolicited innovative ideas from our board and more importantly on the ingenuity of the board to bring those ideas to life. While that culture is great for continuous growth and empowering everyone to come up with great ideas, it can send the efforts of the organization in a lot of different directions. The last year made me realize that we need to focus in on who we are, what we are all about, and exactly who we are serving as an organization. We need to focus on our ethos.

4. Great Ideas Need Great Execution - As I discussed briefly above, we have a culture where all ideas are welcome. Our entire concept has been formed by individuals that have brought forth great ideas that the team ultimately rallied around. This year was no exception. Our tourney was bigger and better than ever, but there were some aspects that did not go as smoothly as we all would have liked. An idea, no matter how great it is, is just an idea until it actually gets executed. That is where the value of great idea is realized.

5. Cost Benefit Analysis, Money & Effort - Next year I would really like to take a hard look at cost benefit analysis for each proposed idea. Our tournaments are centered on two main principles. We raise as much money and awareness for charity as possible while putting on the most competitive and professional hockey events. These pillars of our success are not always pulling in the same direction and we must keep focus on balancing the two. In order to do that we need to take a harder look at the impact that each part of our business model is providing towards both those goals. We could put on the best tournament in the world and use up all the funds that we raised or we could put on a bare bones event and distribute a bit more in charitable donations. Neither end state is what we are about. We need to analyze the money, and more importantly the effort, that must be invested to carry out our team's great ideas to see if those ideas are worth pursuing or not.

6. Project Centric Approach - In order to continually improve, grow, and carry out our mission we need to transition to a project centric approach to managing the implementation of our tournament. This last year our board put in more time and effort than ever before. That effort resulted in a better tournament and increased proceeds to our represented charities. However, I am not sure that the increased efforts of the board resulted in the same magnitude of returns as in years past. The numbers don't lie and our time invested and tournament expenses have started to rise at a quicker rate than the size and proceeds of our tournament. We are all volunteers and I do not view that trajectory as sustainable. I need every one of the board members we have and I want them to want to be a part of our organization for the long haul. This is supposed to be fun and enjoyable and I would hate to have anyone burn out. We need to engage more volunteers and in order to do that we must give them a tangible project to carry out, lead, and make their own. The board will then seek to take on more of an advisory role. A work breakdown of what really makes up our tournament will enable us to do that and will allow us to more effectively manage the planning and execution of the event. It will also lay out a scalable model for us to expand to the west coast and beyond. This will be my focus over the coming months.

Please continue to check out www.checkingforcharity.com as we will be launching a new and much improved website shortly. If you would like to get involved please do not hesitate to contact me or reach out to us on our Facebook page.

Book Review: A Place of Yes by Betheny Frankel

2011-10-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

A Place of Yes by Betheny Frankel is not necessarily the first book I would grab off the shelf. In fact, I am sure I will lose some man points amongst my friends for openly admitting that I read the book. To be honest I don't really care. Betheny is awesome. She has made some of the "wifey shows" that I am dragged into watching bearable. She is the embodiment of the American dream and she is hilarious. So when my wife downloaded her book on my Kindle and I freed up some bandwidth from my reading queue I gave it a shot.

There are a few things that drew me to reading her book and those same things are actually what allow me to relate to Betheny. I am referring to her entrepreneurial spirit and her ability/willingness to persevere through adversity. Rising from a challenging childhood and an unfulfilling early adulthood, Betheny was resilient and refused to settle. Traits I admire the older I get. She took some big risks, worked hard, and eventually sold the Skinny Girl margarita company for a reported $200+ million. People often lose sight of those accomplishments amidst her reality TV career but it is those accomplishments that gave her book credibility in my mind.

The book reads like a classic self help book, ten steps and all, which makes her life story and lessons a bit more tangible. But the real value for me wasn't necessarily realized in the ten steps. I found her personal trials and tribulations to be the most interesting and inspiring. I guess I just digest life lessons in story format a lot better than a textbook read. I think I may move on to some biographies in my next round of books as I really like the context that formula provides.

The book isn't the best I have ever read, and to be honest I am probably not the target market either, but the book had some good lessons and I enjoyed it. If you are interested to read a real rags to riches story and to reinforce some good life lessons then check out her book. Below are some notes and quotes that I captured during my read.

Notes:

Introduction: Who I am, what this book isabout, and what you need to know before you begin:

- This book is about stop saying no and startsaying yes to your own life

- Life is easier when you settle for less than yourdreams, but good enough is not good enough for me

- Each chapter in the book tackles a rule

- 10 rules: Rule 1 Break the Chain, Rule 2 FindYour Truth, Rule 3 Act On It, Rule 4 Everything's Your Business, Rule 5 AllRoads Lead To Rome, Rule 6 Go For Yours, Rule 7 Separate From The Pack, Rule 8Own It, Rule 9 Come Together, and Rule 10 Celebrate

- A place of yes is not just being an optimist itsan "it will happen because I will make it happen" kind of attitude

- Its not where you are all the time but its theplace you go back to. Your home. The real you.

- Coming from a place of yes is about getting downto business. Its active not passive. Yes gives you something to do. A mission,a purpose, a goal.

- Noise is your inner doubt that holds you back andvoice is what is good for you and what is right

Rule 1: Break The Chain:

- "You gain strength, courage, and confidenceby every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You areable to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the nextthing that comes along.'" - Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady

- Everyone has noise that stems from childhood

- First step is breaking the link between what yourfamily thinks of you and what you think of yourself. Who you are now doesn'thave to be a product of your past.

- You must look back and recognize how yourchildhood has affected your life

- Don't get hung up on whether or not it wasnormal. There is no normal.

- Describes a rough childhood and how it impactedher

Rule 2: Find Your Truth:

- "Accept no one's definition of yourlife, define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein, actor

- When you make a decision based on fear it neverworks out

- "We welcome passion, for the mind is brieflylet off duty." - Mignon McLaughlin, journalist

- "Just because you made a mistake doesn'tmean you are a mistake." - Georgette Mosbacher, cosmetics CEO and author

- "Diamonds are only chunks of coal that stuckto their jobs." Minnie Richard Smith, poet

- Every 9 year old boy wants to pitch for theyankees

- Don't give up on your dreams

- "Waiting, done at really high speeds, willfrequently look like something else." - Carrie Fisher, actress and author

Rule 3: Act On It:

- "Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is amatter of choice. It is not to be waited for, it is a thing to beachieved." - William Jennings Bryan, politician

- Focus on the general direction. You can't knowhow things are all going to play out but don't let that hold you back.

- Work hard, learn, do your best, and have fun!

- Action breeds confidence and courage

- "A man's errors are his portals ofdiscovery" - James Joyce, novelist

Rule 4: Everything's Your Business:

- Treat everything you choose to do with as muchimportance as if your career depended on it

- "You make it to heaven, or you make it tohell, by your actions." - George Harrison, musician

- "Decide what you want, and decide what youare willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work."- H.L. Hunt, entrepreneur and oil tycoon

- "A brand is a living entity and it isenriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand smallgestures." - Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Walt Disney Company

- Don't let the world tell you what is or isn't agood idea

- "There are two types of people: the ones whogive you 50 reasons it can't be done...and the ones who just do it." -Hoda Koth, host of the Today Show

- "The quality of a person's life is in directproportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosenfield" - Vince Lombardi, former Green Bay Packers football coach - Awesomequote!

- "The defining factor in success is neverresources, it's resourcefulness." - Anthony Robbins, author andmotivational speaker

Rule 5: All Roads Lead To Rome:

- "You have got to jump off cliffs, all thetime, and build your wings on the way down." - Ray Bradbury, author

- The wrong thing can lead you to what is right

- "Don't make money your goal. Instead pursuethe things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't taketheir eyes off you." - Maya Angelou, poet and author

- "The restaurant business is trying on adaily basis. You must be committed to facing challenges that seem impossible.But when its the moment of truth I just tell my team "Yes we can make thishappen." That's how you separate yourself from the pack." - BobbyFlay, celebrity chef, restauranteur, Iron Chef, and cookbook author

- "Winning isn't everything, but the will towin is everything." - Vince Lombardi. football coach

- Diamond scam story

Rule 6: Go For Yours:

- "Hell is the place for people who did notlive their lives according to the best of what was in them." - HarrietRubin, author and media consultant

- "I don't have to be enemies withsomeone to be competitors with them." - Jackie Joyner Kersee, Olympic goldmedalist

- There is a big difference between ambition anddesperation

- Be yourself and have no regrets because somethingbetter may be right around the corner

- A great idea is worth about a nickel and makingit work is hard

- "I've got a theory that if you give 100% allof the time, somehow things will work out in the end." - Larry Bird,former NBA player

- "Losing is the price we pay for living. Itis also the source of much growth and pain." - Judith Viorst, author

- "Your opponent, in the end, is never reallythe player on the other side of the net, or the swimmer in the next lane, orthe team on the other side of the field, or even the bar you must high jump.Your opponent is yourself, your negative internal voices, your level ofdetermination."

- She learned that when she really goes for whatshe wants she wins even when she loses

Rule 7: Separate From The Pack:

- "In order to be irreplaceable one mustalways be different." - Coco Chanel, French Fashion designer

- "It takes courage to grow up and be who youreally are." - e.e. cummings, poet

- If you live your life trying to make others happyyou will lose touch with what makes you happy

- Its not about being different it is about beingyourself

- "Always be a first-rate version of yourself,instead of a second-rate version of somebody else." - Judy Garland,actress

- "Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new." - Brian Tracy, author and business consultant

Rule 8: Own It:

- "Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people." - Spencer Johnson, business author

- "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end there it is." - Winston Churchill, former prime minister of the UK

- "I believe in me. If I don't nobody else will." - Charles Barkley, former NBA basketball player

- "Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt." - William Shakespeare, playwright

- "True love stories never have endings." - Richard Bach, author

Rule 9: Come Together:

- To come together with others you have to know whoyou are

- "The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stats in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." - Babe Ruth, Major League baseball player

- You don't have to understand others you just haveto respect that their normal is different than yours

- "I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion." - Mia Hamm - professional soccer player

Rule 10: Celebrate:

- Celebrate what you want to see more of

- Celebrate your life. If you're not happy then what's the point?

Transition, The Status Quo, & An Ever-Present Enemy

2011-09-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I have posted. A very long time. I almost feel guilty about it. But a lot has transpired since my last post on sacrifice. I have separated from the Air Force, travelled across country to settle back in Portland, OR, gone through one hell of a job search process, accepted a new position, started my new job, started searching for a house, not to mention the living my life part! It has been a roller coaster ride with many highs and lows, it has taught me some lessons, but most of all it has taught me about myself.

Transition is an interesting thing. There are very few moments in our lives where we really cross over into a new chapter. Most transitions are just slight iterations or developments of where we already are. And although those minor forks in the road are very important and defining in the aggregate, they are not nearly as beneficial introspectively as a major life changing transition like the one I am currently navigating.

My transition out of the military has forced me to really evaluate what I value, what I want my life to look like, and how I am going to make it happen. As I have discussed in many a post, happiness is always the ultimate goal for me and for my family. As evident by my last post on sacrifice, that doesn't mean that there aren't things or periods of happiness that you sacrifice in the name of long term fulfillment. But this transition has really been an amazing challenge in the sense that I had to make a lot of tough decisions regarding whether an option is worth it or not. Worth it in the short term, the long term, and in the entirety of the life I want to live.

Which leads to the next insight derived from my transition experience, that of the status quo. People are social beings. Undisputed. I believe that people are inherently good. Often disputed. With those contexts in mind I think that people are naturally inclined to default in some sense to the status quo, to push others to do the same, and at times to inadvertently give others horrible advice. I don't think that people want to offer poor advice they just innately find comfort in giving advice that is shared by others. Below are some real life examples and anecdotes that not only relevant to my situation but also illustrate my theory above.

"It is a tough economy out there."
"Aren't you scared to not get a job?"
"Why don't you stay in Boston and get a government civilian job?"
"You can't be too picky. People nowadays are just lucky to have a job."
"You might have to take a job you hate until you find something else that you really want."

Did some of these comments piss me off? Yeah, a little bit. Especially when I heard them 500 times. But going back to my initial thoughts, none of these comments were made with any ill intent. I was never mad at the person making the comment it was just the questioning in the aggregate that became frustrating. People give advice based on their own frame of reference and set of life values and as a whole many of those values align to a common theme. The challenge, when following your gut, is to keep a tight watch on what is best for YOU and not to let the constant pressure of the status quo influence your decision making. This was an enormous challenge for me especially when things got tough, when I was rejected, when I hit dead ends, or when nothing was happening at all. It was during times like these that I became all too familiar with the ever-present enemy.

My ever present-enemy is an enemy shared by all....self doubt. My parents gave me and my younger brother an incredible upbringing. I look back and feel like they raised us the 'right' way. They instilled within us a sense of humility and taught us to treat everyone with dignity and respect. They kept me grounded while encouraging me to achieve whatever I wanted. I attribute much of my long term success to those maxims being ingrained into who I am. I think being humble has not only helped me to get along with a wide variety of people throughout my life, but it has also kept me hungry and striving for more. But being humble can open you up to self doubt in the short term. Whether it has been in school, sports, the military, business, or life in general I have always battled self doubt as I am sure most people do. I have witnessed kids in hockey who are anything but humble, to the point that it negatively affects their team relationships, consistently reach heights beyond their ability just because they aren't paralyzed by self doubt. There are a lot of successful people out there who are successful because they attack life with a relentless self assurance. Although I wouldn't trade places with those people, I have taken notice at how they have overcome (or bypassed) fear to achieve their goals. In my case, overcoming fear or self doubt must be a much more conscious decision based on who I am. It is a challenge and one that I continually face at every stage of my life.

My transition to corporate life has been no exception and with the numerous ups and downs throughout the process I frequently faced self doubt and wondered if my goals and dreams were actually attainable. As the old cliche goes, hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back over the last few months I can start to see that my focus on my goals, refusal to accept the status quo, and my ability to overcome the ever-present enemy were all critical in my successful transition. It wasn't always easy but I can look back at this chapter as an embodiment of how to be resilient in pursuit of happiness.

Sacrifice

2011-07-03T04:08:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday was my last 'working' day in the Air Force. I look back and I cannot believe it has been nine years since I set foot on the Air Force Academy campus. Since I knew my departure was coming for quite some time I didn't have a very dramatic emotional experience on my last day, however I did welcome a feeling that everyone experiences throughout the course of their lives. I felt the familiar feeling you get when you know you have reached a crossroads. Last Thursday was the ending of an era for me and although I am extremely excited for the next chapter I will definitely miss many aspects of my Air Force life.

While reflecting on my time both as a cadet and as a member of the active duty Air Force I could not help but to think about sacrifice. The sacrifices I made, the ones my wife made, and how they have impacted our lives. I started thinking about the greater sacrifices that many members of the armed forces make. My reflection led me to another realization, one that I revealed during my departure speech in my unit.

While I was giving my departure speech to friends and coworkers I stated that "my military service gave me far more that I ever gave back. I imagine that statement will become even more true as time goes on and as I embark on new endeavors in the civilian world."

I truly believe that statement. That is not to say that I was bum who took all he could from the military and left, because I didn't, and I am very proud of what I contributed during my service. I was merely expressing my awe at how far I have come since the day I stepped into the dorms of the Air Force Academy.

So were those "sacrifices" really sacrifices if ultimately they benefited me and contributed to my growth and happiness? Maybe I am being naive or romanticizing in hindsight but actions that ultimately benefit you greatly don't really seem to embody what sacrifice stands for. It almost seems more like delayed gratification. Or better yet, an investment in the future. Was the bypassing of a traditional college experience for a regimented character building leadership laboratory really a sacrifice for me? Was the lack of control over where I lived and when a sacrifice, or did it merely expose me to new parts of the world that I never would have otherwise been privileged to? Did the nearly seven months I spent in Iraq away from my family and friends set me back forever or set me apart forever?

Without delving into the Back To The Future-esque arguments that compare what your life would have been like had an event not occurred, I think the point of my riff is that sacrifice is not as straight forward a concept as we may think. I can confidently say that the sacrifices my wife and I have made over the years had shaped us, improved us, and have given us a hell of a ride that we never would have experienced had we not had the foresight, and/or ignorance, to embrace.

Book Review: Poke The Box

2011-06-11T04:01:00.000-07:00

Poke The Box by Seth Godin was pretty much exactly what I expected.....it was awesome. Seth has an uncanny ability to write short, hard hitting, meaningful statements that transcend profession or background and provide the reader with real life, actionable knowledge. Poke The Box is a self proclaimed manifesto about initiative. In short, the book is all about the importance of starting and failing, and how both contribute to doing something meaningful.

We send our kids to school and obsess about their test scores, their behavior and their ability to fit in. We post a help wanted ad and look for experience, famous colleges and a history of avoiding failure. We invest in companies based on how they did last quarter, not on what they’re going to do tomorrow. So why are we surprised when it all falls apart? Our economy is not static, but we act as if it is. Your position in the world is defined by what you instigate, how you provoke, and what you learn from the events you cause. In a world filled with change, that’s what matters — your ability to create and learn from change. Poke the Box is a manifesto about producing something that’s scarce, and thus valuable. It demands that you stop waiting for a road map and start drawing one instead. You know how to do this, you’ve done it before, but along the way, someone talked you out of it. We need your insight and your dreams and your contributions. Hurry.

The book is definitely a great read that I would recommend to a wide range of readers, however I think it resonates best with business and entrepreneurial minded people. Not only does the book help to shape your outlook towards initiating and failure, but it also inspires you to go out and start something.

I will keep my review relatively short since I have already partially reviewed the book on a previous post, and since I took notes that equate to about half the book! Typically I take notes on my books to singe particular lessons and important concepts into my mind. I only write when I feel it is an important passage or concept. As you can see my notes speak for themselves on the quality of Seth's latest work. Although the book is a fairly short read it took me forever to get through it because I spent the entire time taking notes! I guess that shows the quality and importance Seth places on each individual riff and rant. Below are my notes.

Poke The Box:
- The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.

The Initiator:
- Annie story page 41
- para pg 44-48
- This is a manifesto about starting

The Seventh Imperative:
- The world is changing too fast. Without the spark of initiative, you have no choice but to simply react to the world.
- 6 imperatives page 63
- The seventh imperative is to have the guts and the heart and the passion to ship

The difference of Go:
- Passage pg 78

The buzzer box:
- Uncle is an MIT PHD built a buzzer box for kid with lights and buzzers. To a child it is exciting to poke this and see what happens. Life is a buzzer box. Poke it.

The Elements of Production:
- Elements pg 100
- “All these elements are cheaper and easier to find than ever. Which makes the motive force so critical”

Walking in Circles:
- Study shows that lost people walk in circles. Don’t trust your senses because they’re not good enough. People need a map.
- If you’re brave enough to draw one, people will follow

Who Says Yes?:
- What do you do here?
- Almost no one says I start stuff
- Where is the VP of Starting? How many no’s have to be summated before you get to yes? Who is in charge of yes?

Poke the Box:
- How do programmers learn?
- The great ones all learn the same way. They code and see what happens, change it and see what happens, repeat until they figure out how it works.
- The box may be a computer, a market, a customer. It’s a puzzle that can be solved in one way – by poking!

What Can You Start?:
- You don’t have to be a famous entrepreneur to be an initiator
- People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they’re not willing to start something separate, world changing, and risky they have no business starting anything.
- Somehow we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, a stock symbol to matter

When Can You Start?:
- Soon is not as good as now

Kinds of Capital:
- What can you invest? What can your company invest?: 1. Financial capital 2. Network capital 3. Intellectual capital 4. Physical capital 5. Prestige capital 6. INSTIGATION CAPITAL

Double Double:
- In the old world innovation was sufficient to double profits
- In the Google world the competition is essentially infinite and innovation alone isn’t sufficient
- The only way to thrive is to double and then double again. Innovate on the way to innovating.

Is flux the same as risk?:
- Risk involves winning and losing
- Risk to some is bad because risk brings the possibility of failure
- People confuse flux and risk
- 2 mistakes: Risk is a bad thing and movement is bad as well
- These people are stuck
- Now the whole world is in flux
- If your project doesn’t have movement then compared to the rest of the world you are actually moving backward.
- Like a rock in a river, you might be still but given the movement around you collisions are inevitable. There is less turbulence around the log floating down the same river.
- The economy demands flux. Flux isn’t risky.

The trail of failure:
- List of people who have made a career out of starting on page 209

The epidemic:
- We are hardwired with fear in our lizard brain

The first rule of doing work that matters:
- Making a difference is hard
- Make your schedule before you start or your lizard brain will find ways to escape
- Show up

Naps.Google.Com:
- What separates Google from just about every other startup?
- Google ignored Wall St and continued to invest in the new. Most initiatives fail. That’s fine. At least Google isn’t napping.

Your ego and your project:
- Somewhere ego became a dirty word. It’s not otherwise all great work would be anonymous and it’s not. Let it motivate you to initiate.

Redefining quality:
- Quality used to be “good enough”. Then “zero defect”. Now we expect it.
- Now we are beyond quality to remarkable which demands initiative.

Brainwashed by the pit boss:
- You can trust judgment of employees to improve or settle on the certainty of compliance. Most choose compliance.
- This causes organizations to be unable to innovate and promotes the bare minimum.

Why is this mediocre:
- We love to point out broken systems but rarely look at mediocre products and wonder why they aren’t great
- There is never a problem of getting a posse together to fix the broken. The upside and the challenge for you is to find the will and the energy to challenge the mediocre.

When in doubt:
- Quote page 285

Where did curious go?:
- Initiative is a little like creativity in that both require curiosity
- Not a search for the “right” answer but an understanding of how something works and how it can work better

Pick me! Pick me!:
- There is brainwashing that creative people or people with something to say must wait to be chosen
- Pick me mentality acknowledges the power of the system and passes the responsibility to someone else to initiate
- Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself!

The promoter and the organizer:
- Every organizer gets picked and the promoter does the picking. Why not be the promoter?

Entrepreneurship is merely a special case:
- Even entrepreneurs understand that a thriving organization needs more than one person creating change.

The seasons pass:
- Ski resorts sell a year long pass for the cost of a week.
- People who buy it realize it’s easier and cheaper to decide once than it is to decide over and over
- Initiation is like that
- Why not sell your boss and colleagues on being the initiator. It’s your job. You start things. Ask once. Do many.

No free lunch:
- Of course the challenge is you’ll be wrong. You will pick the wrong thing. You will waste time. You will be blamed.
- This is why being an initiator is valuable.
- Most people shy away from the challenge
- Initiative is scarce…..hence valuable.
- The fact is doesn’t work every time should give you confidence because it means you’re doing something that frightens others

Check In Chicken:
- 2 things you’re afraid of at every meeting: Things that might fail and things that might work

The lizard misunderstands the economics of poking:
- When the cost of poking the box is less than the cost of doing nothing you should poke the box
- You don’t shut down a steel mill to use untested technology
- Most of us don’t run steel mills. The cost of being boring is high.
- Our lizard brain exaggerates the cost of being wrong.

Polish this:
- Polishing loses benefit quickly and turns to stalling
- What if your reminder wasn’t to polish but to create

The Semmelweis Imperative:
- Poking also requires tact. You want change not anger/fear
- Semmelweis devoted his life to showing that lack of Drs hand washing was the cause of much of the death and disease
- He died alone and a failure
- He never explained why!
- He was a jerk and never tried to persuade

Welcome to project world:
- Most companies have been around for a decade or more and are based on scalability (Ford model T)
- The system is the system. Don’t mess with it.
- The new companies making an impact are shipping projects. Apple, Google, etc..
- After a project is shipped there is no useful work unless someone starts a new project!

The Ford system is dead. Long live the Ford system:
- You can’t cut prices forever
- The new Ford system is a stable and productive business platform that develops projects

What happened to excellence:
- Tom Peters changed the world with In Search of Excellence
- Excellence is about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing
- Quote page 420

Business Development:
- Some orgs have business development teams. Most are horrible at it.
- This initiation capability is what every org needs but most are too scared

What’s next?:
- What differentiates humans from every other creature is our willingness to go places and explore. The factory has programmed the adventurous out of us.
- What's next is now the driving force for individuals and organizations. Ever onward. Ever faster.

If you see something say something:
- Examples where society will actually dampen our instinct to speak up on page 450

Allowed (not allowed):
- Most employees can give you a long list of things you aren’t allowed to do
- Allowed lists are harder to remember and write down
- Were afraid of how much freedom we actually have and how much we are expected to do with it

The death of idealism:
- Sooner or later many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same as being realistic

Don’t tell Woodie:
- Seth’s dog was trained with a shock collar in their yard. It broke a year ago but the dog can only leave the yard when he takes the collar off. The boundary is in his head not the system

I wonder what would happen:
- None of this works without curiosity
- Success minded people can follow instructions
- We’d all be happy to follow a map if it came with a guarantee
- There is no guarantee there are no maps
- The opportunity lies in pursuing curiosity instead

3000 TED Talks:
- TED conference morphed into TEDx with independent conferences and speakers
- 3000 talks later and it’s pretty clear that big ideas and unsettling concepts were not just the work of people who get paid to think that way
- That’s your opportunity. To approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing

The joy of wrong:
- Original Starbucks founder Jerry Baldwin just sold beans not coffee. Howard Schultz turned Starbucks into Starbucks.
- But what if the “wrong” Starbucks was never built?
- One led to the other but the usual route which is never a straight line
- The hardest part is the first one, the wrong one
- Poking doesn’t mean right. It means action.

The world is a lot more complicated than it appears:
- Google finds your answer, blogger tells you what to do, a book gives you steps to achieve, the company has a policy manual
- It’s enough to persuade you that all the answers are here and all we need from you is compliance
- Two forces driving this: Industrial age where we must make immediate decisions or the system is waiting or digital age where computers like only on or off not a maybe
- Initiative and starting are neither of these. They are about let’s see and try.
- Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated

Rote:
- Quote page 524

“This might not work”:
- It’s ok to say those four words
- Change is powerful but always comes with failure as its partner

Attempt:
- The circus says the performers will attempt not perform. Attempt is something new, something risky, something interesting.
- Yoda was wrong when he said “Do or do not. There is no try.” There is a try and it’s the opposite of hiding

Take a lid off it:
- You already have good ideas, something to say, a vivid internal dialogue about what you could do and how you might make things better.
- There’s an engine running on better but often lies low

Starting implies (demands) finishing:
- What's the distinction between carrying around a great idea, being a brainstormer, and tinkering, and starting something?
- Starting means you are going to finish!
- At some point your work has to intersect the market. Otherwise it is merely a hobby.

Notions belong in the sewing store not in your work:
- We all have notions, inklings, hunches. This isn’t the same as poking the box.
- If you don’t finish it doesn’t really count as starting. And if you don’t start you aren’t poking.

Shipping and fear:
- As you get better at shipping your ability to instigate starts to fade as the fear that others will actually see it makes you scrutinize yourself more.

The initiator as outsider:
- Society isn’t nice to those who don’t fit in
- Great organizations have figured out how to turn the standard or status quo on its head
- The best way to become an insider, leader, someone who matters is to initiate

Winning the Halloween contest (now vs. later)
- Easiest way to win is to tell your kid what to do
- Easiest way to lose is to let him sit there
- The easy way may be the best in the short run
- In the long run though all you’ve done is taught conformity and punished initiation
- Quote page 590

The kid who made a ruckus:
- Kids initiate. They create situations. They start ruckuses. All of them. The essence of being human is to initiate.
- But we aren’t left to our own devices and cease troublesome behavior. Most of us.
- Those who don’t are still busy starting things big and small.
- We can unbrainwash ourselves while there’s still time

The best thing I ever done:
- Don opened up a pizza joint in NYC
- What would his life have been like had he spent more time thinking about and evaluating whether his handcrafted life’s work was a good idea?

How did you end up with this job?:
- Typically a few unlikely breaks and unadorned initiative
- People get good gigs because they stand up
- Annie Duke the poker player set out to fail often enough to get good

The person who fails the most usually wins:
- Once and big is not the most
- Never and you’re lucky or you’ve never shipped anything
- Fail, succeed, fail, fail, succeed, - you get the idea

Juggling is about throwing not catching:
- That’s why juggling is so difficult. Were conditioned to make the catch. To not drop the ball.
- If you get better at throwing the catches take care of themselves
- The only way to get better at throwing is to throw again and again

A paradox of success:
- People with credibility and resources are so busy trying to hold on to them they fail to bring ideas to market.
- The greatest challenge is finding the guts to risk that success in order to accomplish something great

How to walk to Cleveland:
- Shipping is an event. Life before you ship. The moment you ship. Then life after.
- Starting isn’t like that. It is a series of events.
- You start walking to Cleveland. The next day you have to start again.
- Keep starting until you finish.

The go of science:
- One company invented the laser printer, mouse, onscreen windows, and a frame buffer for special effects in movies in 24 months.
- The team had the expectation of initiation and you couldn’t be a star unless you started something audacious
- Al great science works that way. An individual does something audacious, counters the status quo, pursuing a dream that seems ridiculous at first.

The fear of wrong:
- It’s not surprising we hesitate. Starting maximizes the chances of ending up wrong.
- The boss hassles, disciplines, humiliates, fires people who are wrong
- If you’re not wrong that’s not going to happen
- On the other hand, the boss finds someone who never starts, criticizes and plays devil’s advocate and hassles, disciplines, humiliates, fires them
- Wait that never happens in a factory centric organization
- In the new network focused economy the innovation focused organization has no choice but to obsess on those who don’t start
- Today not starting is far far worse than ending up wrong.

10000 hours of hard work and an overnight success:
- Hollerado band used to show up to shows far away from home and say their show down the street got cancelled then they would ask to play and it worked. They would sell burned cds at the local hot topic.
- Released their first cd free online
- Booked a residency tour playing the same bar on the same night during each week 7 nights a week
- Started a label and released a cd in a bag
- 4 years of doing something new, seeing what works, and doing it again

The market is obsessed with novelty:
- So go make some. Were tired of your old stuff.

Organizing for joy:
- Orgs and corporations are organized for efficiency and consistency not for joy
- Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new
- McDonalds, Hertz, Dell, and others crank it out by lowering costs and measuring output
- The problem is that when you approach the asymptote of maximum efficiency there’s not a lot of room for improvement. Making your nuggets for .0000001 cents less doesn’t boost profit much
- Worse the nature of the work is unremarkable
- The alternative is to organize for joy
- The relentless act of invention, innovation, and initiative is the best marketing asset

To be really clear:
- Quote page 723

How to do vs. what to do:
- Often we turn to authors and experts for what to do
- There’s no shortage of to do knowledge
- There’s a shortage of people willing to do it

There is no just in just do it:
- The problem with the Nike slogan is the implication that all you have to do to take the initiative is to take initiative, that it’s a matter of will
- You’re not a starter because you haven’t been sold on the idea, haven’t been trained, or rewarded consistently enough to get into habit
- Now you know what's at stake the rest is up to you

The adventures of Andre and Wally B:
- Movie for son with digital animation. It freaked him out and wasn’t made into a feature film
- Was starting a mistake? How bad did he fail?
- John has won 6 academy awards and key in the evolution of Pixar, the most successful film company of all time. No one else comes close.
- John starts things

The space between the frames:
- The secret to comics is the space between the frames
- This between the frames actions is what makes poking the box so powerful. Action is easy once you have a plan. Formatting a plan is a rare and powerful skill

Why growth happens early:
- Almost all real job growth occurs in the first days
- Once they hit stability they replace workers not invent new jobs
- In the early days no one is sure what needs to be done. It’s not a job it’s a passion, mission, experiment
- Companies that grow after 5 years embrace the discipline of poking

The right thing to do:
- There’s a moral obligation to start. If you’ve got the ability to make a difference you must
- You owe it to others to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them.

A lunch meeting:
- Boss at Yahoo told Seth to sit in cube and await instructions
- His advice if this sounds familiar: 1. Ignore this book (for now) 2. Start looking for a new gig ASAP
- Or ignore your boss if you’re really bold and allow everything to work out in the end.

When it falls apart:
- XFL was a total failure
- “So?” It wasn’t so bad. Everyone came out alright and probably better compared to those who didn’t have the guts to start.
- It’s impossible to have a success only policy. That policy itself guarantees no successes.

Not what I expected to find:
- Part of initiating is being willing to discover that what you end up with is different than what you set out to do.
- Starting doesn’t mean controlling. It means initiating. Managing means controlling but that’s an entirely different skill

What could you build?:
- So many doors are open, so much leverage available. If you could build anything (you can) what would it be?
- If you are afraid to start maybe you haven’t fully understood the cost of not starting

Poking Twitter:
- Watch people new to Facebook or Twitter. They post something and people respond
- That’s not the starting I am talking about. It’s not a real poke, real shipping, real change.
- If you can’t fail it doesn’t count!

Initiating is an intentional act:
- No one answers the phone, goes to a meeting, or reads an email by mistake. Most of what we do is intentional with preparation
- Starting is like that
- We can schedule for it, train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it.
- Why not invest in starting?

When public school forbids the act of starting:
- It’s not in the curriculum is it?
- How much time do we spend challenging our kids to initiate?
- Is it any wonder why we don’t teach this mindset? Factories and managers don’t want spunk or even innovation they generally seek compliance.
- We rely on the disobedient few for innovation but today innovation is our only option

The expensive act of planning on late:
- When you’re late there’s not a lot of choice, decision, initiative
- Run down the path you’ve taken before
- Late gives us cover. It permits us to trample forward without creativity or panache
Late might be useful but it’s expensive to avoid choice.

Dandelion Mind:
- Humans protect our offspring for to lose one would be a great tragedy
- Dandelions spout out thousands of seeds into the air and many end up on a sidewalk somewhere
- The important thing is every spring every crack in every sidewalk is filled with dandelions
- That is how you should treat your ideas, innovations, and creativity
- When was the last time you were promiscuous with your failures?

Riding a bike and being an adult:
- Helping a kid ride a bike and he had a ton of reasons he didn’t want to learn. Turns out the main reason was that he was afraid
- Were extremely adept at hiding our fear
- The point of this manifesto is not to magically extinguish your fear. It’s to call its bluff. Identifying the fear is the first step to making it go away

What to do with good ideas:
- Are you one of those people? Too busy inventing to actually instigate
- 2 things fix this: 1. Start 2. Ship

Fear on the left fear on the right:
- Many fear the start but some do the opposite. Start and then drop it
- The center is where we resonate with the market

It doesn’t hurt to ask:
- Actually it does if you don’t ask in the right way
- Instead of propositioning everyone invest some time in building relationships

Buzzer management:
- The best way to lose at Jeopardy has nothing to do with preparation or smarts. It’s not being good at using the buzzer
- Like most things that matter starting is not a black and white process. If you aren’t making an impact think about how you use the buzzer

Fear of hubris:
- Lesson of Icarus is burned into all of us
- Were trained to fit in not to stand out
- We spend most of our days waiting for permission to start
- It’s not hubris its essential

Starting as a way of life:
- It gets easier. The simple act of initiating is actually profoundly transformative
- Forward motion is a defensible business asset

Safe:
- Halloween is not safe, flying is not safe, selling is not safe
- Innovation is not safe. You’ll fail. Perhaps badly.
- What are you going to do about it? Hide? Work as hard as you can to fit in? That’s not safe either.
- Might as well do something that matters instead

GO! GO! GO!:
- para 974
- "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting." - Siddhartha Gautama

Paid To Drop Out Of School

2011-05-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

Would you drop out of college for $100,000? That is exactly what entrepreneur Peter Thiel is proposing to 20 lucky winners of his foundation's "20 Under 20" contest. The winners will receive a two year stipend valued at $100,000 and mentorship from a network of entrepreneurs en route to creating their own startup company. The only stipulation is that the winners drop out of college or high school to focus full time on building their business.

I found the Thiel Foundation's article on The Economist website. You can read the full post on Thiel's quest to incentivize drop outs here. So why would a college graduate who made millions co-founding Paypal and investing in Facebook want kids to drop out of college?

"We're excited to be working with them, and we hope they will help young people everywhere realise that you don't need credentials to launch a company that disrupts the status quo," said Thiel.

Thiel contends that most kids go to college to avoid thinking about the future and that, by incurring so much debt, many students are actually more at risk by being stovepiped into a career in order to pay back that debt. His foundation is targeting young entrepreneurs who have a plan to create wealth but may otherwise be tempted into attending college versus carrying out their dream. Of course his foundation is drawing plenty of criticism but Thiel responds by saying that people can always go back to college.

I have a few thoughts on this interesting endeavor.

1. We live in a society that loves credentials - Earning a college degree is a great thing. I enjoyed my college educational experience and wouldn't trade it for anything. However, is a college degree really an indicator of success? I would argue it is what you did to reach that point that contributes to your likelihood of success. Yet we as a society love someone who is stamped with a certification, a degree, or a license. Perhaps it the most consistent, quickest, and easiest way to justify your betting on an individual's future prospects but it is by no means a sure thing. I have definitely noticed this throughout my military career, as the military culture places a premium on having a masters degree and no merit in what that degree is in, the quality of the institution, or how the individual has leveraged the skills that were supposedly enhanced by that degree. My sense is that Thiel is frustrated with credentialism within our education system and that is part of the reason he started his foundation.

2. Education leading to action, action leading to education - My educational experience definitely helped me launch my own entrepreneurial venture. To say otherwise would be a lie. That being said, I have often wondered whether it was necessary for the success of my charity. Would I have been able to work alongside my friends to create our charity with a lesser education, or no college at all? I am not sure, but my guess is that based on my values, personality, and skill set that I could have created something special given the same amazing team to work with. Maybe not to the same extent, but I don't think the creation was dependent on my education. What I find interesting is that most people think that you have to learn before you begin, whereas I find I learn the most by beginning. My education definitely supplemented my ability to launch my charity but I think launching my charity really solidified all that instruction into actionable knowledge and experience.

3. If you are passionate and have a plan don't fear rejecting the status quo - I didn't start Checking For Charity until after I graduated college. However, I have experienced the social pressures and comments of a society who feels that it is a necessity to go straight to college after high school. My senior year of high school I was drafted in the United States Hockey League. It had been a goal of mine to earn a Division I Hockey Scholarship since I was a young teen, and in order to achieve that goal I knew I had to play junior hockey. Even prior to getting drafted, I did not apply to a single college. People thought I was crazy. Even people in the hockey community thought it was risky. But I knew that it was my passion and that I would achieve the goal no matter what. I had a plan of how to achieve my goal, and I had the passion to get me there. It's funny because looking back I really didn't have any fear. I knew I would make it happen. Since I have gotten older and taken on more life responsibilities that same confidence can be a bit harder to come by, but I truly believe that the lesson still holds true. If you love what you do and have a plan to accomplish your goals don't listen to the naysayers....make it happen. Thiel discusses a similar theme in his video interview below.

You can view the full video of his interesting interview below.

Life Changing Cheese - Business Lessons From Everyday Life

2011-05-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

People naturally seek to learn about things they are interested in. In my case I am definitely interested in business. I have read numerous books off the Personal MBA reading list, I read business blogs, I listen to business audio books, and I did my undergrad in business management. Although all those sources of information are extremely valuable in developing my own business acumen, I am amazed at how some of the most valuable business lessons are encountered when you least expect them during your daily life.

This past weekend a few friends, my wife, and I went up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the day. Portsmouth is definitely a cool little artsy town with plenty of shops, restaurants, and bars. Our couple friends had been there before and were showing us around. We stopped into a quirky shop with tons of kitchen accessories, wine, and other knick knacks (definitely the least manly thing I have ever written). Our friends had mentioned that the place always had wine tastings and that they had this amazing cheese that we "just had to try."

As I approached the tasting area I saw a man behind the table pouring wine and setting up a platter. It was then that the man said something that caught my attention.

“Life changing cheese.”

Wow. What a great line! I am a very passionate person. When I am into something I am really into it. Whether it is hockey, music, my work, business, or playing guitar I am the kind of person who takes things that I am interested in or enjoy and I turn them into passions. For that reason, I am naturally drawn to people who are passionate about what they do. This wasn’t some person who was there to serve a few drinks and cubes of cheese to collect a paycheck. This guy was passionate about what he did and he was good at it.

The man went on to explain how the cheese was made in a cave in England and that the unique conditions gave it the "life changing" taste characteristics. He spoke of how many cases of cheese they sold a week and how they couldn't keep up with the demand. As he spoke I couldn't help but imagine little leprechaun looking dudes working away in a candlelit cave somewhere in the countryside of England. I must admit the cheese was amazing. The man wasn't just selling cheese, he was creating an experience!

As we walked through the streets of Portsmouth I wondered how influenced my friends were by marketing of the man selling the cheese. I wondered whether the cheese was really amazing or if it was just good cheese that was made great by the experience. I wondered how many other people went around telling their friends about "life changing cheese." I wondered how much cheese the passionate cheese peddler sold compared to the emotionless sample distributors at supermarkets. The fact that the "life changing cheese" experience stuck with me and that I put so much thought into a subject like cheese tells me that it was an example effective marketing at its core.

Not only was it a great day amongst friends, it was also a real life lesson in marketing that I will be able to reference moving ahead. How can I create "life changing cheese" in my own endeavors?

Checking For Charity Concept Video Version 2.0!

2011-04-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted a Checking For Charity concept video I created on my MacBook. Although I had good intentions my graphic execution left a little to be desired. Thankfully, very talented people have been inspired by our organization's goal to change the world through competitive hockey events. The latest Checking For Charity concept video was created by one of our volunteers Alicia Kraus. She does awesome work and has a real knack for carrying out a vision while making it better than you could have possibly imagined. Please visit her website at http://www.aliciakraus.com/. Let me know what you think of the new and much improved video and better yet visit our website and join our team!

What Is Failure?

2011-04-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

What is your greatest failure?

Most people find this question incredibly difficult for a myriad of different reasons. The answer to this question typically provides more insight into how the respondent views failure itself than the actual shortcomings demonstrated of the respondent.

An article was published in The Economist this week called “Fail Often, Fail Well,” that goes into depth on the benefits of learning how to fail effectively.

“Business writers have always worshipped at the altar of success. Tom Peters turned himself into a superstar with “In Search of Excellence”. Stephen Covey has sold more than 15m copies of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Malcolm Gladwell cleverly subtitled his third book, “Outliers”, “The Story of Success”. This success-fetish makes the latest management fashion all the more remarkable. The April issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to failure, featuring among other contributors A.G. Lafley, a successful ex-boss of Procter & Gamble (P&G), proclaiming that “we learn much more from failure than we do from success.” The current British edition of Wired magazine has “Fail! Fast. Then succeed. What European business needs to learn from Silicon Valley” on its cover. IDEO, a consultancy, has coined the slogan “Fail often in order to succeed sooner”.

There are good reasons for the failure fashion. Success and failure are not polar opposites: you often need to endure the second to enjoy the first. Failure can indeed be a better teacher than success. It can also be a sign of creativity. The best way to avoid short-term failure is to keep churning out the same old products, though in the long term this may spell your doom. Businesses cannot invent the future—their own future—without taking risks.”

The piece goes on to give examples of how embracing and managing failures can benefit businesses and is a great read. But how can you apply the lesson to you as an individual as opposed to just looking from an organizational standpoint?

I grew up, like many people in our society, fearing failure. Whether it was working through school assignments or playing kickball at the park I had been conditioned to have a fear of not doing well. Although I think that feeling is very natural for most people I think it is very dangerous as well. By avoiding situations where you may fail you inevitably begin avoid situations where you have the opportunity to succeed.

As I have gotten older and experienced various successes in my personal and professional life I am more and more appreciative of the adversity that led to those successes. I may have not enjoyed the adversity at the time but it was a critical component in my overall success.

Two attitudinal adjustments have helped me immensely in managing my fear of failure and have thereby become a foundation for successes that I have: Although, like anyone else, battling self doubt is always a work in progress for me.

1. Maintain A Commitment To Learning From Adversity: By entering into every endeavor with a desire to learn from the experience it is difficult to categorize any outcome as a failure. So many of my past struggles have served me well in my future endeavors. Of course it is easier to recognize the value in a challenge after the bad taste has faded over time, but that is why it is so important to maintain the commitment to learning from your experiences on the way in.

2. Failure Is An End State And The Only Certain End State In Life Is Death: Failure is a bit of a dirty word for me in the sense that I don’t view most experiences as "failures." The only experience I view as a true failure is quitting. If you don’t quit something entirely you are merely experiencing a setback, and all setbacks can be overcome over time. If you are citing certain experiences as failures you likely gave up. By maintaining that the only certainty in your life is that it will eventually come to an end, a natural shift will occur in your attitude towards setbacks. Things may not always work out just as you would have liked but if you keep moving forward and learn from your setbacks you will avoid settling into a failure mentality.

Successful people and organizations push through and learn from "failures," with the most successful embracing and even seeking out "failure" learning opportunities. Embracing that mentality is not a natural feeling but one that will undoubtedly benefit organizations and individuals alike.

Might As Well Jump....

2011-04-11T14:04:00.001-07:00

Jump.

When friends and family learn about my involvement in Checking For Charity one of the first things they ask is, “how did you go about starting a nonprofit?” Jump is the answer that most naturally comes to mind. I don’t say it to be smart or short or because I think 1984 era Van Halen rules. I say jump because it encapsulates one of the most important lessons that I learned during my innovation journey.

I am part way through Seth Godin’s new book entitled “Poke The Box,” which is dedicated entirely to the importance of starting. Seth argues that while there are many traditionally recognized components to bringing a new venture to fruition the most important factor is largely ignored. That factor is the person with initiative; the person with the guts to say “go.” Below is a clip of Seth describing the concept behind Poke The Box.

I think that Seth has innate ability to simplify complex topics into digestible little knowledge nuggets that truly inspire you. What really sets Seth apart is his ability to choose topics and examples that transcend any one industry or situation. Poke The Box is no exception and based on what I have read so far I definitely recommend reading it.

So when I turn to my friends and family to say that I started my charity through my willingness to jump, I am really telling them that I could have never envisioned what Checking For Charity has ultimately become. By rallying the right people around an inspiring idea and by actually getting the ball rolling on the idea we were able to see where the 'magic of the start' could take us. Here are a few other lessons learned further validating the importance of the start.

1. Planning Is Overrated – Planning is very important, but that is not to say that it isn’t overrated. Planning to implement a new venture or project is great to work through your thoughts and to thoroughly explore the challenges you may face. The problem with planning is that you are focusing on a snapshot in time while life is a moving target. By the time you have thought of “everything” the reality in which you are operating has already changed. Planning also has a way of becoming the focus. Instead of focusing on the objective people often become consumed with putting together a perfect plan to reach the objective. If planning is not getting you a step closer to your goal it is putting you a step back. You cannot plan for everything and all the planning in the world doesn’t guarantee that you will carry that plan out; execution is the real challenge.

2. Improvement Is Iterative By Nature - Rarely do we as humans get anything 100% right on the first try. So the majority of how we improve is done by implementing and correcting over time. If it is guaranteed that you aren’t going to be perfect from the start then you know that you will inevitably be course correcting. By delaying your start you are delaying the value adding component of the process. George S. Patton put it perfectly when he said,"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week." By beginning the process now you enable yourself to keep pace with reality versus having your plan become more and more outdated prior to implementation. As things change you will be able to moderately update your strategy and business model versus completely recreating the wheel prior to implementation.

3. There Is No Substitute For Experience – I had read numerous books on innovation and entrepreneurship before I started my charity journey. I had been involved in the great game of hockey for more than 15 years before I started my charity journey. My education throughout college was focused on fundamental management principles and character based leadership. All of these things undoubtedly prepared me to navigate the startup process. However, in hindsight the most impactful single action that I did throughout the entire process was to jump. I didn’t know what I didn’t know about starting a nonprofit until I started. Looking back I don’t even think it was possible to for me to learn the majority of those lessons in advance. The same holds true for any endeavor. Preparation is great and should never be discounted but experience is our primary educator. What jumping did for our organization was force us to confront and conquer our challenges now versus deferring the confrontation of our problems until we had the 'perfect plan.'

I am not saying to go out with guns blazing with complete disregard for the world around you. I am not naive enough to think that every venture you undertake will be successful. My point, much like the premise of the Seth’s book, is merely that improving your ability to “jump” is one of the most important and rewarding skills you can develop as a leader and a teammate.

Warriors In Transition: A Feature On The White Rhino Report

2011-03-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

I have been featured on The White Rhino Report in a post called Warriors In Transition. The White Rhino Report is the blog of Dr. Al Chase, a friend and the founder of White Rhino Partners. White Rhino Partners is an executive recruiting company out of Boston, MA that as Dr. Chase so eloquently puts it"specializes in placing senior executives who are "Renaissance Men and Women," and who are entrepreneurial leaders - many of whom have had a distinguished military career and/or are Service Academy graduates and hold MBA's from top-tier business schools."

I am honored to be featured in the blog and to be working with Dr. Chase. I look forward to working alongside him to find my way into an organization where I can add value through my unique experiences and professional skill set. Below is the piece that was featured, but do yourself a favor and check out The White Rhino Report for a wide range of interesting topics as Al not only places Renaissance men and women, he is a Renaissance man himself.

Periodically in The White Rhino Report, we tell the story of a warrior who has served our nation in the military and is transitioning to a new career in the private sector. Today I am pleased to introduce the readers of the WRP to my good friend, USAF Captain Matt Bader. Matt is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, where he excelled as a member of the hockey team. He has recently returned from a deployment to Iraq. In the following paragraphs he shares some of experiences he had while serving with Tiger team in central Iraq.

Tiger Team in Iraq:

When I was deployed to Iraq I led a team of people responsible for providing contracting support to bases throughout central Iraq. There was seemingly more work to be done than could ever be accomplished, but you worked 14 hour days and did your best to prioritize the work to ensure the success of the mission. After I had been there a month or so I began to settle in and feel more comfortable in my role. Then I was assigned an additional duty as the lead of the DFAS Tiger Team. DFAS stands for Defense Finance and Accounting Service and they are the agency responsible for disbursing payments to all contractors doing business with DOD. I was charged with reducing the outstanding payments that the government owed contractors for goods, services, and construction that had been completed.

It was an additional duty that nobody wanted. The problems were multifaceted and complex in nature and each week the General in charge of all contracting for Iraq and Afghanistan got reports on the progress so it was very high stakes as well.

My team members were made up of DFAS liaisons, contracting personnel, and me. Most of them were less than thrilled to be given additional duties on top of the seemingly endless workload they already had. Our starting point was more than $2 million in outstanding invoices across Iraq many of which were accruing interest payments and costing the government thousands of dollars. We had conflicting interests amongst the key players and we were facing systemic wartime problems to include government bureaucracy, the fog of war, and the language/cultural barrier of our contractors. The DFAS Tiger Team on the prior rotation had made little to no progress in reducing the outstanding invoices and the lack of progress was becoming a sore spot for leadership. It was definitely an uphill battle.

I must admit that when I first took over I was feeling a little overwhelmed but I did the only thing you can really do in that environment which is put your head down, work hard, and give it your best shot. I knew that fostering a real team environment and creating buy in was the first thing I needed to do to get anywhere. I recognized that the DFAS liaisons were undermanned and often took the majority of the “blame” with regard to the outstanding invoices so I sought to earn their respect by immediately showing them that I cared about making a difference with the DFAS Tiger Team. I empathized with their situation and asked a ton of questions about the process. I think my humility and genuine desire to improve our current state won them over which was huge because they were the primary knowledge holders for the payment process and the inner workings of DFAS. I then sought to establish a common vision that was aligned with the overarching mission in Iraq. I described that it was building the Iraqi economy that was going to get us out of the war. Enhancing opportunities for the Iraqi people is the goal of counterinsurgency and there is no better way to do that then to put the Iraqi citizens to work. With that being said, huge damage can be done to our relations when the work has been performed and we do not hold up our end of the bargain with proper and prompt payment. I made sure that everyone on the team was aware that our team could have a direct impact on preventing extremism and that letting the current state continue could actually be fostering terrorism. It was clear that tying our additional duty to the mission of the war effort was a big turning point for the buy in and camaraderie of the team.

After I got my feet wet and had fostered a unified team environment I got my 8 member team together for a brainstorming session. I facilitated a mini continuous process improvement event for the team. We came up with the challenges we were facing and eventually came up with a set of action items we thought could improve the state of the payment process in Iraq. It was clear that we needed help from outside organizations such as DFAS Rome back in the states who processed all the payments, the Senior Contracting Official for Iraq, and the Brigadier General of CENTCOM Contracting Command. I knew that simply telling higher ranking people and outside organizations we needed help was a recipe for disaster. So we presented our findings in a very strategic manner. We showcased how we brought different stakeholders together and came up with a consensus of the “big rocks” or issues with payment process in Iraq. We then presented what “we,” Regional Contracting Center Central, were already doing to improve the current state. This included new standard work, re-engineered business processes, and visuals to be used as payment processing templates for contractors and customers. It was after our efforts had been showcased that we had a section detailing the help we needed from outside organizations. We tried to portray our findings as “here is what we are doing to help ourselves, but we could really use your help in these areas to take our successes to the next level.”

I presented our findings to my leadership and they in turn passed them onto the SCO-I, and the General. On a visit stateside the General met with the head of DFAS Rome in New York and began forging a new memorandum of agreement between the Command and DFAS.

Within two months the changes our 8 person DFAS Tiger Team had implemented had reduced the outstanding payments by more than 50%. This was without the help of the outside agencies. As I prepared to depart Iraq, The SCO-I emailed me directly for feedback on the memorandum they were drafting to be implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to take over a program that nobody wanted to be a part of and to build a highly performing team that achieved amazing results. We went from the Regional Contracting Center with the largest outstanding payment issues to the model for entire theatre in less than six months.

Matt will be leaving the Air force in the next few weeks. He and his wife are committed to returning to the Portland, Oregon area. If you know of an employer in that area who could use a leader with the kind of skills that Matt outlines above, his work ethic, leadership abilities and unimpeachable integrity, have them contact me to get in touch with Matt.

Dr. Al Chase, White Rhino Partners
1 Broadway, 14th floor Kendall Sq.,
Cambridge, MA 02142
achase@whiterhinopartners.com
office: (617) 401-2113

Groupon: The Fastest Growing Company Ever…But Will It Be The Fastest Declining Ever?

2011-03-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

I have had some interesting discussions with a few friends recently on whether Groupon is “for real” or not. One friend is building an online startup on the side and has connections to the Palo Alto world. The other works in finance and is more well versed in looking into companies’ financial reports. Both are smart but disagree completely on whether the success of Groupon is sustainable. Listening to both sides of the argument, I would say that I fall somewhere in the middle. I think that the fate of Groupon rests within the hands of the leadership of the company.

There is a very well written article in Businessweek that details the rise of Groupon and where it is going. The article, found here, sheds some interesting insight into the company and may have you formulating your own take on the fate of the growing online deal-of-the-day startup.

Mason is the 30-year-old chief executive officer of the digital couponing comet known as Groupon, the Google-spurning, Super Bowl-flopping startup that sends deal-of-the-day e-mails to more than 70 million subscribers around the world. He's wearing a heavy winter coat, a lime-green track jacket embroidered with the Groupon logo, sneakers, and garish red Christmas socks. ("Only clean socks I could find," he says.) Holding his iPhone before him like a tricorder, he logs into the new service, called Groupon Now, and shows off two simple buttons that have the potential not only to transform humankind's lunchtime habits but also to alter the topography of the multibillion-dollar market for local commerce.

The two buttons: "I'm Hungry" and "I'm Bored."

It's only 11 a.m. Mason clicks the "hungry" button, and his phone transmits its location to Groupon's servers and then displays a list of deals from nearby restaurants. Across a bridge spanning the Chicago River, the Asian fusion restaurant Thalia Spice is testing Groupon Now by offering $20 worth of food for $12. A block to the north, an eatery named @ Spot Café is dangling a $10 coupon for $6. Each restaurant has specified that its discount is good only during select hours on that particular day, when a few of their tables would otherwise be empty.

The simple expose detailed above is what CEO Andrew Mason is banking on as the future of Groupon. The vote is out on whether retailers will be on board with a more ‘permanent deal’. In fact the verdict is still unclear on whether retailers are completely satisfied with Groupon’s daily deal approach. Groupon repeatedly advertises a significant return rate for vendors but the media loves to highlight disgruntled users who claim to have lost significant amounts of money through the Groupon imposed deep discounts. What is clear is that there are still plenty of local businesses willing to give Groupon a whirl which should fuel company growth into the future whether it be through traditional daily deals or the new Groupon Now deals.

As I read the article a few things jumped out at me:

1. Easily Replicated Business Model – This is the primary point of contention in the polarized argument between my friends. Anyone can create a daily deal business model and many have. With the flood of players coming into the market, how long will Groupon be able to maintain their incredible growth? More specifically, what if an online player with significant influence (i.e. Facebook, Google) unleashes a similar service? I think that Groupon’s ability to maintain their position as the dominant player in the market segment will hinge on their ability to stay ahead of the competition with regard to where the segment is headed. Is Groupon Now the first step in warding off the competition? Only time will tell.

There were a few things that were discussed in article that I did like about how the company views itself and its challenges ahead. "We had this realization probably a year into launching Groupon that this was highly copy-able," says Lefkofsky. Adds Mason: "We have always been thinking about how to solve these fundamental problems of our model. We have known since very early on that some form of real-time deal optimization is where this had to go." First and foremost, I like that they are aware of the reality facing their business model. Obviously it is much easier to combat your weaknesses and seek new opportunities when you are actually aware of the challenges you face. Mason also made some interesting comments regarding his company idols. "The company I admire most is Netflix," he says, referring to the movie-streaming company that purposefully disrupted its original DVD-by-mail business. "They have figured out a way to be successful and cannibalize their core business. Nothing is more romantic to me." Not only does Mason not mind revolutionizing their business model, he seems to see it as a sign that a company is truly successful. This tells me that they at least have the right mindset for success. Execution is another thing entirely, but one has to look no further than Netflix or Google to see how a business can grow, shift, and change to capitalize on new markets that in many cases have yet to be created. I see the success of Groupon hinging on their ability to do the same.

2. A Battle Against Creative Destruction – The term creative destruction, which was popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1950’s, is defined as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." As companies grow they become more bureaucratic, less flexible, and typically less innovative. These growing rigid organizations are destroyed by smaller, more innovative companies who either revolutionize the marketplace they are in or simply create a new one rendering the old way of doing business obsolete. Every company faces these growing challenges. However one would assume that as the ‘fastest growing company in the world,’ Groupon should expect to face these challenges sooner than an organization with a more traditional growth pattern.

There are a few examples within the article that indicate that Groupon, despite its extremely rapid growth, seems to be operating in a similar manner to its early startup days.

Groupon occupies parts of six floors in the former headquarters of Montgomery Ward, the erstwhile catalog retailer and department-store chain that along with another Chicago merchandiser, Sears Roebuck, defined retail during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Aaron Montgomery Ward might not recognize much of the building he put up in 1908. Groupon employees are jammed in practically elbow to elbow. Doodles and cartoons festoon walls and whiteboards. Shelves are strewn with cartons of bagels and coffee. Adding to the flavor, blue yoga balls, which the company gave to every employee at an all-hands meeting in December, clutter the office and sometimes substitute for desk chairs. A conference room on the sixth floor, the "war room," is the launch pad for Groupon Now. A whiteboard is covered with giant maps of the initial target cities, with tallies of the number of merchants who have signed up in each Zip Code. The company plans to go wide with the service in early April.

Detailing corporate strategy on the walls. Doodles throughout the office. A war room with maps targeting launch cities. People packed together. So what you ask? I think those simple descriptions speak volumes on how the company is currently operating. When you are outlining corporate strategy in brainstorming sessions versus creating bureaucratic point papers and fancy presentations you are doing something right. The idea is what is valuable, not the process to present it. For a company that has grown that much and has had that much capital infusion (i.e. additional vested interests), I think it is pretty cool that they have still managed to operate in that fashion. Perhaps they are taking a page from the Facebook playbook, a company where CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to sit office-less amongst fellow employees and where conference rooms are nothing but glass rooms without shades.

3. Purposeful And Incremental Strategy Improvement – It is quite clear that from the beginnings of Groupon the leadership has been looking ahead to the next step. When you hear company leadership say things like “We have known since very early on that some form of real-time deal optimization is where this had to go,” you see that they are not just riding the daily deal train mindlessly hoping to cash in. Turning down Google’s estimated $6B buyout dispelled cash in motives as well. In the tech sector I think it is all the more important to continually balance knowing where you want to go and capitalizing on changes that may not even be visible yet.

Mason referenced Netflix in the article and it got me thinking about what they have done. I have known about Netflix forever. They were a consistent case study in disruptive markets throughout college. Their DVD mailing model changed the industry. I haven’t joined Netflix yet but I have been thinking about doing it lately. When I went to the website the other day I was amazed that their DVD mailing model is hardly even traceable on the site. Everything is about streaming media now. Their model has changed entirely. With changes in technology and social trends Netflix has incrementally changed direction over the years, evidently without me fully realizing it. If they had offered the strategy shift in one massive roll out it probably wouldn’t have worked out so well. Yet by having a rough strategy in mind and by reacting to world changes over time they have been able to emerge as the market leader in monetizing streaming online media. Mason undoubtedly sees the parallels to his industry and it looks as though they are trying to do the same.

I would love to see the argument on whether Groupon is the next big thing or next big bust continue in the comments section.

Creative Contradiction & Chaos Theory

2011-03-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

Is Michael Jackson an introvert or an extrovert? Well there are countless records of his extreme shyness that would indicate he is an introvert. Yet his on stage performances showcase a completely different and opposite side of his personality. This contradiction of personality is not limited to the late King of Pop. I came across an interesting article on the Huffington Post entitled “After the Show: The Many Faces of the Performer,” which takes an in depth look at the paradoxes entrenched in the personalities of creative people.

One passage particularly caught my attention:

“In the CNN.com article The confusing legacy of Michael Jackson, Todd Leopold discusses the perplexing combination of seemingly contradictory traits displayed by Michael Jackson. In explaining his many sides, Jackson biographer J. Randy Taraborelli essentially throws his hands up in the air in exasperation as he tries to make sense of the apparent contradictions:

‘I think that when you're talking about Michael Jackson and you try to analyze him, it's like analyzing electricity, you know? It exists, but you don't have a clue as to how it works.’

Creativity researchers aren't so confused. They have long-ago accepted the fact that creative people are complex. Almost by definition, creativity is complex. Creative thinking is influenced by many traits, behaviors, and sociocultural factors that come together in one person. It would be surprising if all of these factors didn't sometimes, or even most of the time, appear to contradict one another.

As creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes in his 1996 article for Psychology Today entitled The Creative Personality, creative people ‘show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude.”’

To me, some of the most fascinating contrasts are those found in creative performers -- those who are constantly on stage and in the public eye.

Although I completely agree with the prognosis of the creative personalities described above, I would argue that the great majority of people exhibit these same contradictions. Certainly creativity is complex. However, I think it is more appropriate to say that people in general are complex! Maybe we are more attuned to these contradictions in creative types because the contradictions are presented on a grand stage for all to see. Are you going to notice personality paradoxes more in the guy Mark from ‘Accounting’ at work or Michael Jackson? Or perhaps the opposite ends of the personality spectrum in creative people are just a bit more exaggerated or pronounced. I am not sure. What is certain is that people are complex whether labeled “creative” or not.

The article got me thinking about how the creative contradiction relates to effective team situations. How do you effectively lead a group of people in a creative environment given the various personality idiosyncrasies of each team member that are constantly changing based on the dynamic environment?

That question took me back to college. When I was attending the Air Force Academy as Business Management major I took a Management 303 class which had the reputation of being the weird, touchy feely class. It was described as pretty abstract and ethereal with notoriously low test scores that were salvaged only by the grading curve. Although I too struggled to grasp many of the concepts we learned about, I did hang onto the concepts from our talks regarding chaos theory in management.

Chaos theory seeks to describe the unpredictability of systems. A dynamic system like any organization or team environment is innately complex, erratic, and unpredictable. Chaos theory, however, shows that even the most complex and chaotic systems fall into some natural order. The chaotic inputs are connected and create some form of order through “strange attractors.” Strange attractors essentially create natural boundaries for chaotic, dynamic systems.

Since taking that class, I have always tried to analyze any leadership or team situation with chaos theory in mind. I definitely think chaos theory is an effective way to look as systems. All the external changes that occur coupled with the complexities of human behavior make predictability of even the most simple tasks utterly impossible. Which brings us back to the question discussed above. From my experience here are a few things that may help to answer the question above.

1. Stay Flexible – I have had the opportunity to lead in some very dynamic, ambiguous, and challenging environments. Whether it has been serving as the captain of a division I hockey team, the president of a nonprofit, or as a contracting officer team lead during Operation Iraqi Freedom I have learned to expect the unexpected. You simply cannot, for reasons detailed above, predict what is going to happen in a team environment while seeking to attain a goal. The more comfortable you can become operating amidst ambiguity the more effective you will be at achieving your goals, even if the path is different than you might have hoped.

2. Create Your Own Strange Attractors – Although easier said than done, I think as a leader it is your responsibility to create strange attractors versus allowing them to develop by chance. Although you may not be able to predict how things will unfold for your team, you can help to shape how your team will respond to the ever unfolding chaos. An example could be as simple as establishing shared values amongst team members. You cannot control how each person will respond to a given situation but you may help to ensure that their response does not violate the team’s shared values.

3. Acknowledge Your Powerlessness – Embracing the chaos is acknowledging your powerlessness in a sense. Not to say that your role as a leader is not important and that you do not have influence. As a leader you want people to want to do the "right" thing. In essence you want to create an environment, or a system, where it is most desirable for all parties involved to do the right thing. Not only are you acknowledging reality by operating in this mindset of limited control, but you are also empowering team members to attain your organizations goals in the most innovative and creative manner possible.

I am by no means a guru on the subject of chaos theory in management or the personality contradictions of people. These are just a few observations I have picked up in my leadership experiences thus far. To be honest, half the time my posts serve more as reminders to myself than holier than thou advice columns. I would love to hear your viewpoint on the topics above and thanks for reading.

Checking For Charity Concept Video

2011-02-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

Our first Checking For Charity concept video. This is version 1.0 and it will likely be incrementally improved so please leave comments/suggestions!

Converging vs. Diverging From The Norm

2011-02-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

How do you differentiate between a high performing organization and everyone else? There are countless answers that likely differentiate the two. However, as I was sitting in a two hour training seminar for contracting personnel at work today and I couldn't help but notice one extremely important differentiator.

When people hear the term government acquisition, high performing organization is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. That is not to say that there aren't extremely capable people and teams within the career field because I have definitely worked with both. However, the combination of bureaucracy, regulation, and a risk averse culture of the government procurement career field doesn’t propel it into the ranks of what many consider a high performing organization.

As I sat through the training session I could not help but notice the same phrases directed at the audience. "If you don't do this....then the auditors will slam you," or "You better do this.....or the Inspector General may write you up," and "You should be doing this.......because it is a direct reflection of you and your superior's work." It was relentless and I couldn't help but feeling like I was being pushed around a bit. Threatened almost. The kind of warnings one receives throughout childhood. Unfortunately these kinds of messages are the norm in the government arena. In the government contracting environment individuals are pushed to converge with what is ordinary. In that environment ordinary is good. Ordinary means staying well within bounds. Ordinary means being reactive to any feedback that is filtered down. Ordinary is the safe play. Ordinary (hopefully) keeps your organization out of the headlines.

In my experience, high performing organizations force you diverge from the ordinary. A high performing organization says "You better create or do something new and unique....or something bad will happen to you." There is a distinct incentive to not only break free of the status quo but to change it for the better. Instead of coloring well within the lines you go outside them and establish new boundaries that you would not have known were possible had you not put yourself out there. When an organization forces you to diverge from the ordinary you in essence become extraordinary, and being extraordinary is the epitome of what a high performing organization is all about.

Growth, Bureaucracy, and Creative Collaboration

2011-02-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

There have been some exciting things going on with Checking For Charity this year. Since its inception, our team has managed to grow both the size of the tournament and money raised for charity by more than 100%. We are seeking to do the same this year and have set a goal of a 24 team tournament that we hope will raise more than $50,000 for charity. We are structuring to expand to a west coast division and have an even more exciting long term strategy that is yet to be disclosed. So with the continued growth of Checking For Charity what is there to worry about? The same challenges that any growing company faces.

Organizational Balance: Creativity and flexibility have undoubtedly been a large factor in the early success of our charity. We take creative and motivated people and we turn them loose to make things happen for our cause. It is a formula that is not only successful but also extremely rewarding to be a part of. People are empowered to grow and improve their area of influence and I believe they come up with ideas that they wouldn’t otherwise have come up with had the culture been more structured. The flip side of that culture is that you can have a lot of people doing a lot of things in a lot of different directions. Part of my role as President is to ensure that we are implementing ideas that are in line with our strategy as well as ideas that most effectively use our limited resources whether it be money, manpower, or time. In order to do that there must be some corporate structure and organization in place. Having a greater than 100% year over year growth makes this all the more important and urgent. So that is the new challenge of our growing organization. Balancing between staying organized with a clear strategic vision while remaining creative and vigilantly avoiding/destroying unnecessary bureaucracy at the same. It is a difficult challenge that will undoubtedly be with us while we continue to grow but I am confident that we can find the right balance moving forward.

Creative Collaboration: When we first started out we were structured as one team of people where each person carried out a variety of individual tasks that were assigned to them. We have since grown and are now structured more like a traditional business. We have assigned leads to different functional areas to include finance, marketing, hockey operations, etc. Those functional executives run teams of volunteers and are ultimately responsible for actions that fall within their scope of responsibility. Having served in the Air Force for the last five years I have learned valuable lessons as to the potential downfalls of a functional structure. In the Air Force there are often competing priorities, incompatible systems and information sharing, and lost opportunities for synergy between the numerous functional areas. These challenges are sure to arise in varying degrees within any organization that is structured in a functional manner, however I feel that the challenges are just much easier to see in an organization as large as the Air Force or Department of Defense for that matter. So how do we establish a culture where cross functional collaboration is the norm while still empowering the various teams within their given lane? The short answer is that we are working on it. It is a relatively new problem for us but as we continue to expand it will become more important. One way we are seeking to promote a creative, collaborative, cross functional culture is by taking advantage of the amazing new technological aides that are out there.

I was put in contact with an executive of Wasabi Ventures through a very good friend of mine. Wasabi Ventures is a smaller venture capital firm that happens to have stake in PBworks. My friend is involved in a project with Wasabi and was curious if we could benefit from a PBworks account. I was familiar with PBworks because a few of the blogs I read and a few of the people I follow on Twitter were tied to it in some way, however I must admit I was a bit naïve as to what it could actually do for an organization like ours. After discussing similar challenges in our different companies and realizing that CFC could benefit greatly from this service my friend reached out to the guys at Wasabi and before I knew it they had graciously donated a PBworks account to our cause.

PBworks is a real time collaborative wiki. Which basically means that you can share and collaborate on documents in a virtual workspace. You can have the various members of your team collaborating on documents within the workspace. There is a social networking type capability within the system as well where individuals can make comments or recommendations almost like a comment feed on a blog. I am by no means an expert yet but it is very intuitive and easy to use and I am really excited for the possibilities it can bring to our organization’s future. My role, with the help of my extremely organized wife, will be to lay the groundwork for our workspace and corporate organization so that we can incorporate this tool into our culture. With the prospects of a western division expansion in the next year or two, PBworks could not have come at a better time. For those interested in the capability of PBworks you can view a quick demonstration video here.

More to come of the future of Checking For Charity. If you are interested in playing, volunteering, donating, sponsoring, partnering, or anything in between please do not hesitate to contact us at checkingforcharity@gmail.com. Remember "Our Goal Is To Assist!"

To Know Thyself

2011-01-22T04:12:00.000-08:00

"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self. " - Benjamin Franklin

"This above all; to thine own self be true." - William Shakespeare

"Friendship with one’s self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self." - Napoleon Hill

"Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change." - Stephen Covey

What do all these great quotes have in common? They all acknowledge the importance of knowing yourself. I have recognized the importance of knowing myself for a long time, and I am sure that throughout my childhood it was imparted upon me in one way or another. In fact a big reason I started blogging was to truly challenge my beliefs and to reflect upon where I am and more importantly who I am.

The other day I took a Myers-Briggs Test Workshop for Choosing and Changing Careers. The premise of the workshop was to learn more about your personality preferences and to leverage that enhanced knowledge of yourself to find a career you truly love. Although the workshop had a career slant I think going through such a workshop is just as applicable to many other facets of life as well.

Here are a few things I took away from the workshop:

1. I went into the workshop with a fairly good self awareness. That was reassuring. I think the combination of my team sports background, military background, and conscious attempts (blogging, reading, starting a non-profit company etc.) to get to know myself better have paid off. That being said we all are constantly growing and changing so the journey to understand yourself is just that; a journey, not a destination.

2. Your personality is a profile of preferences in the way you respond to outside events. If you are extrovert you can still be introverted in various situations. Being an extrovert simply means that your preference is to respond to different life events as an extrovert does. There is a sliding scale of how strongly you identify with a certain preference.

3. Your personality profile can and does change in different situations. Although my "personal" and "work" self were largely aligned there are some scenarios where my preferences change. For instance, I am more laid back and have a go with the flow attitude in my personal life whereas I appreciate a more solid schedule and organized work environment.

4. Improving your own self awareness allows you to better recognize other peoples personality types and allows you to more effectively interact with different types of people.I couldn't help but analyze where my wife would shake out on the Myers Briggs test. It was pretty enlightening to see that the source of some of our minor disagreements may not be a lack of desire to resolve those disagreements but two differing preferences on how to respond to outside events. A simple example is cleaning the kitchen. My wife notices every crumb where I take more of a holistic view of how the kitchen ties in with the rest of the home's appearance. These are not coincidences. They are living examples of our differing personality profiles. My awareness of this subtle distinction in our preferences will surely make me more sensitive to how she lives her life....and may even improve my counter-wiping ability. Although this is an oversimplified example, it can be applied to relationship management in any scenario.

5. There are a few different facets that would make up my “dream job” that are consistent with my personality profile. I must be in a creative, team environment that is very collaborative in nature. Not surprisingly this ties in very nicely with things I have been passionate about in my life. Whether it was growing up playing hockey, starting Checking For Charity Corporation, or leading a team of contracting professionals in Iraq I have always thrived and enjoyed these types of environments. My future career should be no different.

Book Review: Stones Into Schools

2011-01-12T06:26:00.001-08:00

Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson: I was finishing up Three Cups of Tea as I headed into Iraq for my six month deployment. I gave the book a very positive review by stating that I think it should be a mandatory read for politicians, the military members, and the children in our school systems. I made that bold statement because I felt I learned more in the book about the region we have been at war with for the past decade than I have anywhere else. More specifically I stated, "I learned more about Islam and the countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan than I did in all my time in the military. The book taught me more about the real issues in that area of the world than any news article I have ever read. I am kind of ashamed to admit that, but it is what it is."

So it is quite fitting that I started Greg Mortenson's second book as I began to transition out of Iraq. A girl that was in my wife's sorority in college happened to come across my review of Three Cups of Tea and she also happens to work for Penguin Publishing who released both works under their name. In a very touching sign of appreciation for what I was contributing to overseas, she sent me the sequel along with a few other Penguin releases. I thought that was pretty cool on her part and the part of her employer.

Mortenson’s best-seller, Three Cups of Tea (2009), introduced his commitment to peace through education and became a book-club phenomenon. He now continues the story of how the Central Asia Institute (CAI) built schools in northern Afghanistan. Descriptions of the harsh geography and more than one near-death experience impress readers as new faces join Mortenson’s loyal “Dirty Dozen” as they carefully plot a course of school-building through the Badakshan province and Wakhan corridor. Mortenson also shares his friendships with U.S. military personnel, including Admiral Mike Mullen, and the warm reception his work has found among the officer corps. The careful line CAI threads between former mujahideen commanders, ex-Taliban and village elders, and the American soldiers stationed in their midst is poetic in its political complexity and compassionate consideration. Using schools not bombs to promote peace is a goal that even the most hard-hearted can admire, but to blandly call this book inspiring would be dismissive of all the hard work that has gone into the mission in Afghanistan as well as the efforts to fund it. Mortenson writes of nothing less than saving the future, and his adventure is light years beyond most attempts. Mortenson did not reach the summit of K2, but oh, the heights he has achieved. --Colleen Mondor of Booklist

Mrs. Mondor's review of the piece is dead on. But what I found particularly intriguing was the progress that was made since the first book was published. Stopping at the accomplishments detailed within Three Cups of Tea would be enough for Greg and his CAI counterparts to feel that have lived a worthy life of positive contribution to this world. However, to see how Three Cups of Tea has inspired people across the world while unifying people with seemingly incompatible views and beliefs is truly inspiring. I think the book speaks volumes in showing that a good idea founded on honorable principles can truly change the world even if it is one small step at a time.

I also really enjoyed the praise that Greg Mortenson gives the US troops. Not just because I am a military member, but because I think the work that our servicemen and women are doing often gets lost beneath the ever-present political banter of the major media outlets. Greg showcases how it was the military that first began embracing the Three Cups of Tea "education not bombs" strategy of eradicating extremism. And it wasn't the high profile Generals either. It was the everyday leaders of our nation's fighting force. A grass roots movement so to speak that has undoubtedly helped shape the strategy of our efforts overseas.

The book optimistically ends detailing that although there is a long way to go in that part of the world immense progress has been made with regard to education opportunities, especially for young girls. During a time where it is difficult to be anything but pessimistic about our politician's assessments of our nation's two wars it is good to see that some tangible gains have been made with regard to human progress. I highly recommend both books and offer my notes from Stones Into Schools below.

Forward by Khaled Hosseini:
- 8 years into war Afghanistan is considered a failing state but there are success stories as well and most meaningful is education
- 1/2 million children attending school and 40% are girls
- "If you educate a boy you educate an individual, but if you educate a girl you educate a community."

Introduction:
- Tells of Masreen, a Pakistani women, and her struggles to pursue education
- "When it comes down to it, I am nothing more than a fellow who took a wrong turn in the mountains and never quite managed to find his way home" - Greg Mortenson
- He has made more than 680 appearances in more than 270 cities in the last three years
- "When you hand this money over to the folks over there on the other side of the world," said one local businessman, who had tears in his eyes as he spoke, "just tell them that it comes from a little town in the mountains of Colorado so that their daughters can go to school."
- 1 year of education in primary school can result in an increase in income of 10-20% for women later in life
- Simply put, young woman are the single biggest potential agents of change in the developing world. A phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as the girl effect.
- In Muslim societies a person who has been manipulated into believing in extremist violence or terrorism often seeks the permission of his mother before he may join a militant jihad, and educated women as a rule tend to withhold their blessing.
- Taliban targets regions for recruitment where female literacy is low
- It is important to be clear about the fact that the aim of the Central Asia Institute is not indoctrination. We have no agenda other than assisting rural women with their two most frequent requests: "We don't want our babies to die, and we want our children to go to school."
- "In the end, the thing I care about, the flame that burns at the center of my work, the heat around which I cup my hands, are their stories." - Greg Mortenson
- "The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger. The second cup, you are a friend. But with the third cup, you become family - and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die." - Haji Ali

Part I: The Premise:
Prologue:
- "The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all." - Aung San Suu Kyi

The People At The End Of The Road:
- "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve." - Albert Schweitzer
- They start at the end of the road and work their way back. Serve the most remote areas overlooked by other NGOs
- When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance, or compassion we are all made richer by their example
- Works alliances with anyone including Taliban and hires inexperienced based on gut instinct
- He learned it from his father who had done the same in Africa with a hospital

The Man With The Broken Hand:
- "Mountains can never reach each other despite their bigness. But humans can." - Afghan proverb
- Sarfraz Khan has a tough but incredible background
- Like everywhere else in Afghanistan, geography is far less important than relationships
- When you comprehend the dynamics of power, everything else falls into place
- "And so it was that our conversation on that snowy evening in Zuudkhan marked the beginning of the greatest friendship of my life." - Greg Mortenson
- "For me, a hard life is no problem. But for our children, this life is no good. We have little food, poor houses, and no school. We know you have been building schools in Pakistan, so will you come and build the same for us in Afghanistan? We will donate the land, the stones, the labor, everything that you ask. Come now and stay with us for the winter as our guest. We will take tea together. We will butcher our biggest sheep. We will discuss matters properly and we will plan a school." - Roshan Khan a Kirghiz rider
- Greg promises to build the Kirghiz a school way up in the Wakhan

The Zero Year:
- Of the many ways in which the Taliban perverted and brutalized the tenets of Islam, however, nothing quite matched the crimes that they visited upon their sisters, daughters, mothers, and wives
- Within the first week of taking Kabul the Taliban stripped away these privileges and summarily rendered the female population silent and invisible
- Winter 2002 = zero year in Afghanistan
- After 9/11 $680M in aide money promised by President Bush had been "redirected" to build runways and bulk up supply depots in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar for the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan was now receiving less than a third of the per-capita assistance that had been plowed into reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, East Timor, or Rwanda, and of that less than half was going to long term development projects such as education.

The Sound Of Peace:
- Sarfraz delivered the hand recorded census of the Kirghiz and Greg appointed him the "most remote area project manager."
- "Look here. Look at these hills. There has been far too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs, who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians and the Taliban. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn these stones into schools." - Sadhar Khan
- "You may be a veteran but you are not a warrior because you have never fought in battle. Sitting here watching the water rush past is the only way that I can justify having gone to war. The reason I fought the Soviets and then the Taliban was for moments such as the one we're having right now. Unless you have been inside the fire of a battle, this is something that you will never understand." - Sadhar Khan

Style Is Everything:
- "War has forced us to starve not only our bodies but also our minds. This should never again happen to my people." - Sadhar Khan
- The pleading was always polite but the needs were endless
- Official paperwork was always a challenge due to the (lack of) Afghanistan's functioning government

The Seal Of The Kirghiz Khan:
- "But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Martin Luther King Jr.
- In the 90's drug trade flourished to fund the mujahadeens war efforts. Eventually it began to infiltrate peasants and remote villages
- Up to 1/4 of the adult population were addicts
- Karzai made promises to Abdul Rashid Khan but didnt follow through
- The desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo had the entire region enraged. Proof that we are growing increasingly interconnected in this world
- Elders stopped the rioting and ransacking of the CAI school in Baharak. The elders claimed it as their school. They had ownership.

Qayamat (The Apocalypse) Part II:
A Dark and Distant Roar:
- Pakistan earthquake occurred on 8 Oct 2005
- In the past 50 years Pakistan has suffered through 4 wars, two political coups, floods, political assassinations, and other disruptions but never anything like the earthquake. 7.6 magnitude that triggered 2,252 landslides. Over 86,000 deaths making it the 12th most destructive earthquake of all time. A quarter of those deaths were children in school. Over 3,794 schools in Kashmir and 2,159 schools in the Northwest frontier were destroyed.

No Idea What To Do:
- CAI went to Kashmir to give aid after the quake
- US Chinook helicopters were helping the relief effort. "Sarfraz talked to some of the pilots and learned that those who had served in Iraq could not believe that the people of Pakistan actually liked them. In the coming years, many of these pilots and their crew members would look back upon those weeks as the highlight of their military careers."
- Islamic extremists were often better at aid than the various NGOs
- Combining aid with ideology was a highly effective strategy. "I have always been dismayed by the West's failure, or unwillingness, to recognize that establishing secular schools that offer children a balanced and non extremist form of education is probably the cheapest and most effective way of combating this kind of indoctrination." - Greg Mortenson

Farzana's Desks:
- "When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children." - Greg Mortenson
- Greg's daughter tells him to start putting playgrounds in the schoolyards. He is amazed he hasn't thought of it.
- Taliban sympathizers even get a kick out of the playgrounds

Sarfraz's Promise:
- Sarfraz got an infection and had surgery
- Recruited Chinese to start building earthquake proof schools
- He was following in his father's footsteps without ever really intending to

The Chance That Must Be Taken:
- "History is a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells
- CAI started sponsoring girls for advanced education
- Often family and community object
- With the success of the first book Greg was travelling and fundraising nonstop. He crashed and had to return to home to rest. He became the fundraiser and sacrificed his trips to the schools, the thing he loved most.

Part III: The School On The Roof Of The World:
An Email From An American Colonel:
- "Education is the long term solution to fanaticism." - Colonel Christopher Kolenda
- "People in that part of the world are used to death and violence. And if you tell them 'We're sorry your father died, but he died a martyr so that Afghanistan could be free,' and if you offer them compensation and honor their sacrifice, I think that people will support us even now. But the worst thing you can do is what we're doing--ignoring the victims by calling them collateral damage and not even trying to count the numbers of the dead. Because to ignore them is to deny they ever existed, and there is no greater insult in the Islamic world. For that, we will not be forgiven." - Greg Mortenson
- "I'm no military expert and these figures might not be exactly right. But as best I can tell, we've launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced non extremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?" - Greg Mortenson
- It was the American military officers who felt the US strategy needed to be revamped in both wars
- "We can't kill our way to victory." - Admiral Mike Mullen
- The military embraced Greg and Three Cups of Tea
- "More than almost any other profession I have encountered, members of the military seem willing to acknowledge their failures and mistakes and to recognize that this is the first step towards learning and growth." - Greg Mortenson

The Man From The Jalozai Refugee Camp:
- Locals went against the Taliban and had girls attend school
- Unknowingly the schools they built in Afghanistan formed an arc that pointed to the birthplace of the Taliban

Barnstorming Through Badakshan:
- Finally certified as an NGO in Afghanistan
- Honored by Musharraf of Pakistan. Ironic they have better relations with Pakistan than our own government
- Musharraf is impeached
- They met with Musharraf for more than 4 hours. "Most high level delegations, they only get very short meetings with Musharraf. The President of China --maybe 30 minutes. George Bush, maximum 15 minutes!" - Nazir
- "The contrast between my activities and those of most of my staff seemed to underscore an even larger problem: the extent to which I have been forced to pull away from the aspects of my work that I find personally and spiritually fulfilling in order to attend to what is generally referred to as 'the big picture.'" I have similar feelings with my own charity as I have been forced geographically to tend to the bigger picture without being heavily involved in the gratifying groundwork.

A Meeting Of Two Warriors:
- "The Muslim community is a subtle world we don't fully--and don't always-- attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of people's culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative. We cannot capture hears and minds. We must engage them; we must listen to them, one heart and one mind at a time." - Admiral Mike Mullen
- Started neighborhood literacy centers for older women and it exploded
- "Wakil quickly realized that this enthusiasm was the byproduct of taking a group of women who had been forced to lead restricted and sequestered lives, putting them into the same room, and simply giving them the license to dream."
- Admiral Mullen inaugurated one of the CAI schools

The Point Of Return:
- Back in the Kirghiz but can't figure out how to get supplies in
- "How do you build a school on the Roof of the World when transporting the construction materials from any direction is virtually impossible?"
- Greg slipped into an intense fever and is forced to return home short of the Kirghiz village

The Last Best School:
-Abdul Rashid Khan the leader of the Kirghiz fell ill. Greg broke his promise and asked the US military for help. It made its way all the way up to Gen Patraeus and McChrystal
- The mission was too close to China and too risky based on fuel
- "This was no the outcome I had hoped for, but as I read the General's message I also understood that it was the correct decision. Although the assessment team's calculus may have sounded somewhat cold, it underscored the most important question to ask: Would it be right to place the lives of two American helicopter crews on the line while risking international incident on behalf of a patient who was probably beyond help? In my heart, I knew that the answer was no." - Greg Mortenson

Epilogue:
- "We live at the edge of the world, and since no help is going to arrive, we have no choice but to do this ourselves. This school is our priority. At this point, we have almost no resources left. But starting from this moment, everything that we have will be focused on one goal. Inshallah, we are going to finish what we have started." - Abdul Rashid Khan
- Nearly a decade after Greg's initial promise to the Kirghiz the school was finally finished
- "Like it or not, you see, my reasons for wanting to get a first hand glimpse of that gem of a school in the High Pamir are probably not compatible with the role that I played in its completion. Because when it really comes down to it, aside from the service that I performed as a kind of one man yak train that faithfully transported the donations of ordinary Americans to the far side of the world, what was accomplished at Bozai Gumbaz had nothing whatsoever to do with me. A fact that for a time, I must now admit, was not easy for me to accept." - Greg Mortenson
- "By succeeding at an endeavor in which a government, an army, and an NGO had failed, a band of impoverished nomads were able to construct, on the loftiest and most distant corner of their republic, something even greater than a school. They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters. Including, and perhaps especially, those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran." - Greg Mortenson

Thoughts On "Why Are All Our Best Officers Leaving The MIlitary"

2011-01-09T05:34:00.000-08:00

There is an article that was recently published in The Atlantic magazine that is surely stirring up some controversy. The article is bluntly called, "Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving The Military."

I must start with a disclaimer of sorts. I am transitioning out of the military this summer. With my pending transition the title of the article definitely caught my eye, as it surely was designed to do. However, it wasn't because I consider myself the "best." I am a pretty humble guy so by nature it is hard to view myself as one of the best officers. I was more curious than anything else. With that being said, I certainly do not think that ALL of our nation's best officers are leaving the military. I have served with some unbelievably talented officers and leaders that are making the military a career and like any other organization the leaders will be a representation of our nation as a whole with the good, the bad, and the ugly making up our leadership ranks.

With my personal disclaimer out of the way, I must say that I think the article most definitely holds some validity and that many of the problems identified in throughout author's article are real.

Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. As a result, it’s losing its vaunted ability to cultivate entrepreneurs in uniform.

What I really liked about the article is that it wasn't just some naive opinion piece with a catchy title. The writing was backed with real life studies and surveys that have been researched over the years. As I began to read the findings that came from the aforementioned surveys and studies I was amazed at how closely they matched my own reasons for separating. Not only my own reasons but the frustrations I have discussed with my peers over the course of my military career.

A widely circulated 2010 report from the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College said: “Since the late 1980s … prospects for the Officer Corps’ future have been darkened by … plummeting company-grade officer retention rates. Significantly, this leakage includes a large share of high-performing officers.” Similar alarms have been sounded for decades, starting long before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the exit rate of good officers an acute crisis. When General Peter Schoomaker served as Army chief of staff from 2003 to 2007, he emphasized a “culture of innovation” up and down the ranks to shift the Army away from its Cold War focus on big, conventional battles and toward new threats. In many respects (weapons, tactics, logistics, training), the Army did transform. But the talent crisis persisted for a simple reason: the problem isn’t cultural. The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy.

And that is when it hit me. When I read the final word of the passage. The word 'meritocracy' instantly took me back to something I did while deployed to Iraq. While deployed, at the request of my Commander, I completed a voluntary and informal "exit survey." The survey was created by my Commander, when she learned I was separating from the Air Force, to track trends of departing Company Grade Officers from the Contracting career field. Her genuine desire to address the problems in our military/career field coupled with her care for her people not only made me feel obligated to complete the survey, it made me feel honored to provide brutally honest feedback that may in some small way make the Air Force a bit better for the people behind me.

I opened my 'exit survey' for the first time since submitting it to my Commander in Iraq and I went to one of the first sections. The section asked me to describe my top five reasons for separating. Under reason number four I had listed "Meritocracy." Below is an excerpt of my response:

Meritocracy: I have always been very intrinsically motivated. I enjoy giving my best and do so without many external incentives. However, I have found that working in the government setting can be frustrating at times. I think that being in a career field that is heavily populated with civilians and contractors as well as military has made it even more frustrating. It is hard to work in [the] contracting [career field] and not notice that there are plenty of workers who do in fact very little working. Not only is it frustrating to watch as a fellow teammate but it is typically compounded by the fact that many of these people make more money than me and get more time away from the office than me. Not that money is everything to me. Not even close. I think that as an officer [in the military] the money and benefits are more than sufficient for my lifestyle and I am appreciative of how I have been able to set myself up quite nicely for the future given the paycheck I receive. However, I do have a problem working in an environment where the external incentives seem completely misaligned with the amount of responsibility and contributions to the team. I hate to generalize my civilian counterparts because I have worked with some great ones, but over time I have noticed a trend that many civilians want all the benefits of being in the military without any of the sacrifice that comes with it. I am not naïve enough to think that my transition to the corporate world with solve all my frustrations and that everything will be “fair”. However, I am looking for an environment where I can differentiate myself through performance and be compensated both internally and externally based on my merits.

As I continued through the article, I was amazed at the findings from the respondents in the survey and how closely they matched many of my peers sentiments and experiences. Below are some of the results that really stood out to me.

Among active- duty respondents, 82 percent believed that half or more of the best are leaving. Only 30 percent of the full panel agreed that the military personnel system “does a good job promoting the right officers to General,” and a mere 7 percent agreed that it “does a good job retaining the best leaders.”

Is this so terrible? One can argue that every system has flaws and that the military should be judged on its ultimate mission: maintaining national security and winning wars. But that’s exactly the point: 65 percent of the graduates agreed that the exit rate of the best officers leads to a less competent general-officer corps. Seventy-eight percent agreed that it harms national security.

The shame of this loss of talent is that the U.S. military does such a good job attracting and training great leaders. The men and women who volunteer as military officers learn to remain calm and think quickly under intense pressure. They are comfortable making command decisions, working in teams, and motivating people. Such skills translate powerfully to the private sector, particularly business: male military officers are almost three times as likely as other American men to become CEOs, according to a 2006 Korn/Ferry International study.

I too believe that the military does an excellent job attracting and training leaders. In fact one of the sections of my exit survey asked what I thought the Air Force does well. Below is my response:

What do you think the Air Force does exceptionally well?

Developing professional critical thinking leaders: I look back at all the unique challenges, experiences, and educational opportunities I have been given while in the Air Force and I start to think that the Air Force has given me much more than I ever gave in return. Sure the sacrifices are difficult; however I feel that the 9 years I spent in the military lifestyle have set me up for success in any endeavor I choose to pursue.

I think the Air Force has developed a culture, especially amongst its officers, that is founded on professional character based leadership. This is not an easy culture to establish en masse, but the further I go along in my career the more I realize how successful the Air Force has been at providing me a foundation for leadership success.

I think that based on the statistics above, Corporate America is finding value in folks with military leadership experience. The fact that men with military experience are three times as likely to become CEO as compared to their civilian counterparts is a statistic that shows the transitional success is not a mere coincidence. So why does the military have a hard time retaining great leaders when they do such a great job crafting them? That is a question author Tim Kane also sought to answer through his research.

Why is the military so bad at retaining these people? It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more- lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system—every aspect of it—is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day— regardless of an officer’s competence—so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.

The Pentagon’s response to such complaints has traditionally been to throw money at the problem, in the form of millions of dollars in talent-blind retention bonuses. More often than not, such bonuses go to any officer in the “critical” career fields of the moment, regardless of performance evaluations. This only ensures that the services retain the most risk-averse, and leads to long-term mediocrity.

When I asked veterans for the reasons they left the military, the top response was “frustration with military bureaucracy”—cited by 82 percent of respondents (with 50 percent agreeing strongly). In contrast, the conventional explanation for talent bleed—the high frequency of deployments—was cited by only 63 percent of respondents, and was the fifth-most-common reason. According to 9 out of 10 respondents, many of the best officers would stay if the military was more of a meritocracy.

Ironically deployments was the fifth reason out of five on my exit questionnaire as well. Although these generalizations are not true for all members of the military I think that there are many that do feel aligned with the concerns cited above. Most of my best friends in the military are competitors. Many spent years competing at the highest levels of sports, academics, etc. and the most frustrating environment you could possibly put them in is one where they feel constrained and held back. I am a firm believer that over time people rise and fall to where they deserve to be based on their merits. However, when driven people are given the choice to enter an environment that more efficiently rewards overachievers and winners inevitably some will make the jump.

Another facet of the current military struggle is differing outlooks on the status quo. For better or for worse many within the younger generations look at the status quo differently than their upper leadership. It is not that the younger leaders of the military do not buy into a culture that promotes integrity, honor, service and excellence, as that is definitely a cultural norm that they believe in. What the youth of the military struggles with is the status quo line of thinking. The youth of our country has been brought up to embrace their differences, to stand out, and to become their own unique person. One has to look no further than the trends of our information age to see the demand for individualization thriving. Anyone can start a blog, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account, and much more. People are creating their own individual identities and virtual thought profiles online from a very young age. In a sense the new currency is ideas and the marketplace is rewarding people for their ideas. Anyone who has served in the military knows that is not always the case in the military environment. Often the individualized personas and unique beliefs that are embraced in the new world are seen as 'risky' in the military world.

In a 2007 essay in the Armed Forces Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling offered a compelling explanation for this risk-averse tendency. A veteran of three tours in Iraq, Yingling articulated a common frustration among the troops: that a failure of generalship was losing the war. His critique focused not on failures of strategy but on the failures of the general-officer corps making the strategy, and of the anti-entrepreneurial career ladder that produced them: “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.”

In America today, capitalism is entrepreneurial: our economy is defined by individuals failing or succeeding on the strength of their ideas. Crucially, the military has not recognized this shift. And the Army, in particular, has not changed from its “inefficient industrial era practices,” as a report by the Strategic Studies Institute put it last year. It still treats each employee as an interchangeable commodity rather than as a unique individual with skills that can be optimized.

That last line really hits it on the head for me. How can the military take the unique individuals that serve as the core of its make up and skillfully utilize those assets to make the organization better than it was? That is the ultimate goal. Of course it is easier said than done in one of the largest organizations in the world but the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

I love the military and what it stands for. Any organization that is consistently recognized as one of America's most trusted institutions while simultaneously navigating some of the most critical and challenging missions on the planet is doing a lot of things right. I decided to write this post because I believe in our military and I want it to continue to be the world's best for my friends that stay in, for my country, and for the next generation. I truly believe that by consistently striving to improve and by continually addressing the evolving challenges like the ones outlined in this article, our nation's fighting force will continue its tradition of success long after I am gone.

BadskiBlog Top 10 Of 2010!

2011-01-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

2010 was a challenging year. Between adapting to new job/city, going into hibernation for 2-3 months studying for the GMAT, running Checking For Charity from afar, and a six month deployment to Iraq away from my lovely wife and dog it is easy to see why it has been a challenging year and why BadskiBlog has taken a hit as far as quantity of content goes. With that being said, I can honestly say that I have been much more conscious of churning out quality verses quantity this past year. As I get “better” at blogging I find myself struggling more and more to ensure I have worthy topics to write about. I don’t want to write posts that don’t get my adrenaline going a bit. I want to post topics that challenge me and continue my goal of exploration and growth. Here are my 'self proclaimed' best posts of 2010 in no particular order. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this blog in one way, shape, or form.

1. Full Circle - Lessons From One Sandbox To Another: A group of life and leadership lessons that were learned as a child yet helped me while I was deployed to Iraq.

2. Optimist Optimized: A post detailing how my deployment experience changed my perspective on my life stateside. The greatest gift I was given was the ability to see just how blessed my life stateside is.

3. What You Can Learn From A Group Of Has Been Metalheads - Anvil: The Story Of Anvil: A movie review of "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." The movie is an unbelievable feel good movie that made huge waves in the independent movie scene. It is not just about playing loud with these guys, it is about living a fulfilling life. Plenty of life lessons to be learned from these unlikely wise men.

4. Practice, Preparation, and Paralleling Reality: Thoughts on optimizing your habits, practice and preparation to successfully accomplish your goals.

5. Warren Buffett On Integrity: An awesome video from a humble, wise, and honorable business leader on the importance of integrity. I love how Warren Buffett makes the most simple statements seem like the most insightful statements in the world. Often we get so bogged down in complex theories and practices that we forget the powerful and truly timeless themes for success that are overarching in a myriad of pursuits.

6. Humility & Hubris - Learning From A Punch In The Mouth: This passage explores different scenarios where getting a dose of humility can be a good thing and how you can approach adversity and come out the other side a better person.

7. A Combat Landing - Welcome To Your New World: Initial thoughts and observations of my journey in Baghdad, Iraq. A combination narrative and introspective exploration of the deployed world.

8. Mental Balance And A Growing Trend: A couple articles on the unique skills and experiences that Junior Military Officers (JMOs) are bringing to Corporate America. The post also has interesting statistics showing the changing value placed on JMOs by Corporate America over time and of course some of my own thoughts on the subject.

9. The Deployment Mirror - Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV: Narratives detailing my daily life in Iraq. The posts mostly spawned from requests of family and friends to share my experiences in a manner similar to the Combat Landing post above. I must say that as a kid I did want to be a "creative writer" when I grew up so these posts were a welcome departure from my normal blogging.

10. Goodbye Baghdad!: Quick thoughts from Al Udeid, Qatar just a few short hours after I had departed Baghdad for home.

Becoming The Trend

2010-12-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

Above is the (great) video for "Icarus Lives!" by the band Periphery. I must admit that when my brother first turned me on to them I didn't necessarily know how to digest them. I dug their sound but looking back I definitely didn't appreciate just how unique their music really is. Judging by the 'e-chatter' floating around about these guys it is safe to say that they have made an impact on the metal community. Although I wouldn't say they are my favorite band of all time it does speak volumes that I have probably listened to their cd more in the last few months than I have any other cd I have. Why am I intrigued by this band? Because they don't sound like anybody else.

That got me thinking back to all the bands that I have really dug over the years. What do they have in common? They don't sound like anyone else. They have a distinct personality or dare I say it, brand. Of course there are copy bands that will follow in the footsteps of unique bands, but when a great band steps outside of what is common there is a period of time where they truly stand alone. I think those few drops of sand in the hourglass where a band is out ahead of the trends are really special moments. And it is those moments that generally shift the way a genre is headed. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica, Pantera, In Flames, At The Gates, Killswitch Engage, The Black Dahlia Murder are a few that come to mind over the last few decades that have truly been unique and influential and that stand alone for a brief period of time before eventually shifting the direction of the genre (list is definitely up for debate). So what happens when a band bucks the trend and ventures out into aberrance? They become the trend.

Although established social norms often reward conformance and toeing the line so to speak, it is these trips off the beaten path that can be the most rewarding and defining in the long run. How can I seek opportunities to break free from the status quo, to truly grow as a person, yet still remain tangible and enjoyable to be around as a husband, a friend, a professional, and a member of society? Where can I go against the grain and become the trend for the betterment of myself and those around me? That is the challenge, and if it takes analyzing metal bands on my blog for me to recognize this transcendent life lesson so be it.

Passion Barometer

2010-12-08T17:10:00.000-08:00

"If I had all the money in the world, I would be doing exactly what I'm doing right now."

Can you say that about your job? Your life? Well that is exactly what Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan was quoted as saying in her interview with the CNN Small Business Blog. Simonetti-Bryan transitioned from a career in finance to achieve a coveted Master of Wine certification. Below are some details of her story with the full article available here.

Simonetti-Bryan had an existential crisis that many young professionals face: Working nights and weekends, staring at models on a computer screen, she felt bored and unsatisfied. Only 10 more years, a colleague told her, and she'd make managing director.

A few weeks after that, a fateful business lunch set the analyst on a new course. While giving a presentation in the corporate dining room of Citicorp's London office, Simonetti-Bryan was served an herb-crusted salmon paired with a Sancerre, a crisp white wine from France's Loire Valley. The way the acid in the wine cut right through the oil from the fish sparked her curiosity. She began taking classes in wine appreciation, and in the wake of Citi's merger with Smith Barney in 1998, she took the plunge, abandoning her six-figure salary for a wine shop job, then becoming brand manager for Cakebread Cellars and Domaine Carneros while collecting industry certifications.

One of those was the Master of Wine designation, the industry's highest honor. After passing a four-day exam that involves identifying 36 wines, applicants must write an original piece of research that furthers the industry. Simonetti-Bryan studied six hours daily on top of a full workday, sometimes suffering from "palate fatigue." "There were some days," she says, "where I was like, 'I don't want to look at a glass of wine. I don't even want to think about a glass of wine,' and then you get that one glass of wine and you go, 'Ah, this is why I'm doing this.'" In 2008 she became only the fourth woman in the U.S., and one of 289 people worldwide, to obtain the coveted title.

Although I enjoy a good glass of wine (or bad…..I must admit I cannot always tell the difference), wine is not what drew me to this article. What drew me in was someone going through a transition that is integrated in both their work and life. I am a big proponent of work life integration versus work life balance so stories like Jennifer's always appeal to me. Her quote above is a quote that serves as the barometer for how she is living her life. She loves what she does and wouldn’t change a thing about it. This wasn’t always the case for her which allowed her to recognize what she had once she got there.

I am going through a work/life change as I transition out of the Air Force this summer. Although I can’t say that I wouldn’t change anything if I had all the money in the world, I really do love my life. The only part of my life that wasn’t as fulfilling as it needs to be for successful work life integration is the work part. Although I am good at what I do and I enjoy it…sometimes, my heart is not fully invested in my current career path. Being a sports guy, I know what is possible when you are truly passionate about something. I need to find that something again.

Coming out of the service is tough because I don’t necessarily know what I want to be when I grow up yet. There are a few different avenues in business that interest me but as far as a specific job title goes I haven’t narrowed that down yet. I may just have to steal the quote from her to use it as my own passion barometer in determining what I want to do moving forward.

Perhaps I am an idealist. Perhaps I am just naïve. Who knows. All I know is that Simonetti-Bryan has what I want. She has a life and a career that are successfully integrated and she truly loves what she is doing. I am a little nervous but very excited to be breaking into the great wide open (hat tip Tom Petty), but I will trust my gut, work hard, and see if I can’t land my dream job too.

Full Circle - Lessons From One Sandbox To Another

2010-12-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

Life is a funny thing. As you get a bit older and get some experience under your belt your perspective on things definitely changes. The older I get the more I believe that the majority of what has made me successful in dynamic team environments was learned at a very young age. This concept hit me pretty hard while I was deployed to Iraq.

Over the course of my time in Iraq I was in charge of a team of military, civilian, and contractor personnel. I have been in charge of different people, teams, and groups before but for some reason when I was deployed I was much more apprehensive about my capabilities as a manager and leader. Maybe it is because the military mission was smacking me square in the face. Stateside you do not necessarily always see the negative impact of your mistakes. On a deployment the stakes are high. My contracting team's failures directly impacted the war fighters and support troops in theater carrying out the mission. That reality was definitely something I took seriously. As my nerves and doubts got the better of me I was constantly trying to remember lessons learned from college business classes, from the numerous management and leadership books I have read over the years, and from the blogs I frequent. Due to the nature of my no notice deployment and the operational tempo in Iraq I was thrust right in without the convenience of being able to revisit and review leadership and management principles; I was forced to go with my gut and what I have internalized over the years.

Now that I have been back in the good US of A for a few weeks and have had time to reflect on the extremely positive management and leadership experiences I had in Iraq, I look back and my nervousness and insecurities and I almost laugh. I am amazed at how much of what made me successful as a leader over there weren't complex theories and cutting edge management formulas but lessons that I learned as a kid playing on the playground or in the sandbox. Here are a few lessons learned in the school sandbox that helped me immensely in the deployed sandbox:

Learn to Share: I tried to redirect all compliments and make sure that the credit went to my team. Careerists often struggle with this one. We all want to advance and be recognized but avoiding taking credit for the team's successes is crucial to continued team success. Your team will recognize your gratitude for their efforts and your superiors will, over time, see that you are a component of the team success as well even though you humbly redirect credit.

Quit Now Be A Quitter For Life: I distinctly remember my parents drilling this lesson into my head at a very young age and I am grateful they did. I think this simple but impactful lesson has been transformed into many clichéd life lessons. When the going gets tough the tough get going. Work hard and the rest will take care of itself. Quitters never win. The list goes on. Regardless of how its worded, the spirit of the lesson helped me immensely overseas. There were times where I just didn't think that I could do all the work that needed to be done. There were times that I didn't think that I had the stamina to make it through the remaining months. I was uncomfortable, tired, overworked, and most of all I missed my family and friends back home. Whenever I felt overwhelmed like that I just put my head down and worked through it. What other choice did I have? Not much to be honest but I think life is the same way. When you get dealt a bad hand you just have to keep working through it, because you can't quit life either.

TEAM = Together Everyone Achieves More: I still remember playing two hand touch in elementary school with my buddies. I can remember the exhilarating feeling I got when we put together a team that kept winning. That was my first taste of synergy in action. All throughout my hockey career and now into my Air Force career I have loved the feeling of being on close knit high performing teams. Those types of teams are not easy to come by but the feeling you get being a part of one of those teams is amazing. In Iraq being part of a team is a necessity. Deployments are not easy so you have to lean on people more than you are used to. But that vulnerability and shared experience creates strong bonds which was refreshing and reminded me of my old hockey playing days.

Cheaters Never Win: People always talk about integrity in the military. I often hear it described as doing the right thing even when no one is looking. That definition, although quite tangible and good to live by, does the spirit of integrity a bit of injustice. Having integrity in what you do and what you say makes you a precious commodity. Normally I am fairly non confrontational. Out there working with the Army things were a bit different than what I was used to working in an office setting in Boston. If you don't speak up and know what you are talking about in Iraq you will get stream rolled by higher ranking hard charging Army dudes! The stakes are high, the tempo is fast paced, and people are stressed out. It is definitely not the place to be timid. So saying what you mean and living by your principles and virtues is more important than ever. Over time I saw that the leaders above me recognized that I had an opinion. Generally that opinion was thought out, reflected my true feelings, and it was founded on a genuine concern for our task at hand and a desire to improve. Having that integrity to stand behind what I said and did made me a constant source of consultation for the senior leaders in our organization. It was a good feeling. It was refreshing to know that you don't have to be a "yes man" or a "brown-noser" to be recognized as valuable to the team. If you work hard and do in your heart what you know is right then you will be recognized for your contributions to the team.

I am sure I could think of a few more but these are the big lessons that come to mind. I would love to hear comments on other childhood lessons that have served people well in their lives. Thanks for reading and it is great to be back!

Optimist Optimized

2010-11-21T04:30:00.000-08:00

Before I deployed for six months to Iraq I thought that I would write about the many lessons learned throughout my time there. If you read my last post you know why that didn't happen. I thought that upon my return I would write about some of the lessons learned during my deployment once I had some time to reflect on all that I had experienced. That really hasn't happened either so far. So I find it a bit ironic that after a week back in the states adjusting to my old (but seemingly new) life that my first inkling to write again is not on the topic of what I learned in the desert of the middle east but what I have learned about my life stateside.

I have always been an optimist. Not a blind idealist by any means, but definitely someone who seeks to find the best in most situations. However after being purged of all but a few remnants of my stateside life for last six months, I now find my optimism optimized.

Like balance in anything else sometimes it takes the tough times to appreciate the good times. Although I never want to deploy and be away from the life I have built again, I am grateful for the experience because it has given me the ability to truly see how blessed my life really is.

The first few days I was back in Boston with my wife I could not stop gazing outside at the colors that were almost blinding after six months of different shades of brown. The sight of people living, working, and playing together in the neighborhood was suddenly a beautiful glance into what we have in this country and what our freedoms are all about. Holding my wife on a nice comfortable couch enjoying some good tea and even better conversation was the most fulfilling and enjoyable experience in the world.

I feel that with my small contribution overseas I have been given the gift that many great men and women veterans before me have been given; the gift of perspective. I can see now why most veterans are passionate people that enjoy life and love their country. They have seen what other areas of the world are missing. They have tasted the bitterness of sacrifice, many of them much more so than I ever did. They have felt the deep longing for loved ones and for a simple life back home. Most importantly, veterans have experienced the overwhelming feeling of a return home to a familiar life with a completely unfamiliar but glorious clarity of just how great the gift of life truly is.

Goodbye Baghdad!

2010-11-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

I am sitting watching a beautiful desert sunset at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. As I logged into my blog I realized that it has been over a month since my last post. With all the things that were going on during my deployment, all the commitments, all the people to stay in touch with, and my own personal mental sanity something had to be sacrificed and unfortunately that something was my writing. After I take a few weeks to relax and fully enjoy time with my wife I plan on getting back into a more regularly scheduled writing regimen similar to the frequency pre-deployment. What will likely be different are the topics I write about and my views of the world. I have been through so much in such a relatively short period of time and these past six months have certainly changed me and helped me grow.

As I look back now that I am out of Iraq I think that subconsciously I may have avoided sitting down and writing. I think I avoided writing because I was acutely aware that the multitude of experiences within my deployment were just too much to fully process. I am sure that over time I will have a better understanding of the magnitude of the reality I was living and how that reality was shaping me as a person.

I went through some tough times during my deployment but I also went through some great ones. The experiences I gained from my time in the desert are undoubtedly priceless experiences. I feel more confident in myself and what I can achieve moving forward. I cannot wait to taste my old life again and appreciate just how great it is, and I cannot wait to make it even better. Although I would never willingly seek out another six months away from my family and friends again, I wouldn't trade what I have experienced either.

Some of what I have taken away will undoubtedly be shared as it will not only benefit those who have not experienced what I have but it will help me understand and grow from my deployment. Some experiences will be shared with friends, some will be saved for my family, and some will remained locked within as the moments and emotions cannot be successfully transfigured into words.

I thank you all for standing behind me as I made this journey and I look forward to rejoining you and living the good life back in the best country in the world. Goodbye Baghdad!

Book Review: The Big Short

2010-09-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

Coming off of one of the best books I have read in a while, Mustaine, I didn't think I would steam through another book so quickly. However, when I picked up The Big Short by Michael Lewis I was hooked instantly. The book is an incredible read that takes the reader on a surprisingly tangible trip through the subprime mortgage crisis.

Michael Lewis, most famous for his piece The Blind Side, which was recently turned into a major motion picture, does an excellent job of not only making what happened to our economy understandable but also entertaining. He does so by profiling a few interesting and important characters in the subprime mortgage meltdown. Although he does showcase some big name players and tell of their roles in how history played out, the real magic of his work comes from telling the tale through eyes of the few who saw it coming. Hence the title The Big Short.

The Big Short is not the story of the crisis, as the crisis is commonly understood. The failure of Lehman brothers and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the stock-market crash; the bail-out of Detroit; the fevered all-nighters pulled at Treasury and the New York Fed; the fears that the entire global financial system was on the brink of collapse -- little if any of that is in this book.

Instead, Lewis has found a different story -- one which he started mining for a spectacular cover story in the December 2007 issue of Portfolio magazine, and which has culminated in this book, over two years later. It's the story of what used to be called the "subprime crisis" before it metastasized into something much larger and more dangerous than that. And it's also, like all Michael Lewis tales, a human story, which takes us deep inside unique characters like Steve Eisman and Mike Burry.

Telling the story through the eyes of those betting against Wall Street's big hitters and the mortgage backed securities that eventually led to the chaos experienced in September of 2008 makes for a truly interesting perspective. It also allows Lewis to come off as less of an I know it all author who has forgotten that hindsight is 20:20. The story is told from the guys who can truly say 'I told you so' because the whole time they were putting their money where their mouths were.

Here are some notes from the book:

Prologue: Poltergeist:
- Predicted crash would occur almost 20 years ago in his first book Liar's Poker
- "If you'd gotten a few drinks in me and then asked what effect the book would have on the world, I might have said something like,'I hope that college students trying to decide what to do with their lives might read it and decide that its silly to phony it up, and abandon their passions or even their faint interests, to become financiers.'
- He kept waiting for a rebellion but it didn't happen

A Secret Origin Story:
-Steve Eisman was a nerdy badass
- "You don't even own stock in your company" said Eisman to the Japanese businessman. "In Japan it is not customary for management to own stock," said the businessman. Eisman noted that the guy's financial statements didn't actually disclose any of the really important details about the guy's company but rather than simply say that he lifted the statement in the air as if disposing of a turd. "This......this is toilet paper. Translate that!" he said.
- When asked about the pattern of upset he leaves in his wake, Eisman simply looks puzzled, even a bit wounded. "I forget myself sometimes."
- The big fear of the 1980 mortgage bond investor was being repaid too quickly not fear of not being repaid at all.
-"And the story they liked to tell was that 'we're helping the customer. Because were taking him out of his high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into a lower interest rate mortgage debt.' And I believed that story." Then something changed.
- None of his fellow accountants was able to explain why the traders were doing what they were doing. "I didn't know what I was doing," said Vinny. "But the scary thing was, my managers didn't know anything either. I asked these basic questions--like, Why do they own this mortgage bond? Are they just betting on it, or is it part of some larger strategy? I thought I needed to know. It's really difficult to audit a company if you can't connect the dots."
- Essentially a ponzi scheme. As long as they were growing the illusion was masked.
- Eisman wrote a report and trashed all the subprime mortgage originators. "Here is the difference between the view of the world they are presenting to you and the actual numbers." The subprime companies did not appreciate his effort. "He created a shitstorm," said Vinny. "All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: you're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR fucking data!"
- "You have to understand, I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."
- "The very first day we said, 'There's going to come a time when were going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It's going to blow up. We just don't know how or when."

In The Land Of The Blind:
- Worst loans by Michael Burry's standards are interest only negative amortizing adjustable rate subprime mortgages
- "What you want to watch are the lenders, not the borrowers. The borrowers will always be willing to take a great deal for themselves. Its up to the lenders to show restraint, and when they love it, watch out." By 2003 he knew the borrowers had already lost it. By early 2005 he saw that lenders had too.
- You couldn't short the mortgage bonds
- Burry began buying corporate credit default swaps on companies he though may suffer from a real estate downturn but there was no guarantee these companies would go bankrupt and that is the only way he would get paid.
- He bought credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds in 2005 guessing in two years after teaser rates jumped his bet would pay off.
- The market didn't exist so Burry pitched Wall St. Only Deutsche and Goldman had any interest and no one saw what he was doing.
- He went from blogger to millionaire overnight because Gotham Capital was making money off his picks and offered him a million to open his own fund.
- White Mountain followed shortly after
- Volatility doesn't equal risk. "By and large the wealthiest of the wealthy and their representatives have accepted that most managers are average, and the better ones are able to achieve average returns while exhibiting below average volatility. By this logic a dollar selling for fifty cents one day, sixty cents the next day, and forty cents the next somehow becomes worth less than a dollar selling for fifty cents all three days. I would argue that the ability to buy at forty cents presents an opportunity, not risk, and that the dollar is still worth a dollar."
- He was turning away money after a few years. "He designed Scion so it was bad for business but good for investing."
- Charlie Munger said you can always predict how people are going to behave by looking at their incentives.
- "You can say everyone knows that. I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther," said Charlie Munger.
- He went against the industry fee standard to properly align incentives
- Their decision making was one guy in a room pouring over publicly available information
- 2003 Bury called the real estate bubble. "You just have to watch for the level at which even nearly unlimited or unprecedented credit can no longer drive the housing market higher. I am extremely bearish, and feel the consequences could very easily be a 50% drop in residential real estate in the US....A large portion of current housing demand at current prices would disappear if only people became convinced that prices weren't rising. The collateral damage is likely to be orders of magnitude worse than anyone now considers."
- In 2005 when he first tried to convince Wall St of the credit default swaps for subprime mortgage bonds his first big problem was that they didn't share his sense of urgency
- He started buying and was amazed that no one on Wall St cared which funds he was shorting. It was like all subprime bonds were the same thing
- "Burry devoted himself to finding exactly the right ones to bet against. He'd read dozens of prospectuses and scoured hundreds more, looking for the dodgiest pools of mortgages, and was still pretty certain even then (and dead certain later) that he was the only human being on earth who read them, apart from the lawyers who drafted them."
- He even found a mortgage pool that was 100% floating rate negative amortizing so the borrower could not pay any interest and just have their loan grow and grow until default. Goldman sent him a congratulations for being the first to buy a credit default swap on it!
- He tried to start a fund to do only CDS but no one would pony up money
- The S&P was down 6.84% in 5 years and he was up 242% but no one believed him when it came to credit default swaps
- People wouldn't give him money but started prodding Goldman on how to do it themselves
- All the Wall St players started coming to him to buy back his CDS all at once
- He sold back to Deutsche and then saw an email that said "Greg Lippmann, the head subprime mortgage trader at Deutsche bank was in here the other day. He told us that he was short 1 Billion dollars of this stuff and was going to make 'oceans' of money. His exuberance was a little scary"

How Can A Guy Who Can't Speak English Lie?:
- Greg Lippmann of Deutsche went to pitch Eisman as if the CDS idea was his own
- Lippmann used a Chinese guy to give credibility to his numbers. "Eugene Xu was responsible for every piece of data in Lippmann's presentation. Once Eugene was introduced into the equation, no one bothered Lippmann about his math or his data. As Lippmann put it 'How can a guy who cant speak English lie?'"
- Eisman had two questions: 1. How does a CDS work again? 2. Why are you asking me to bet against the bonds at your firm?
- "When he walked in and said you can make money shorting subprime paper, it was like putting a naked supermodel in front of me. What I couldn't understand was why he wanted me to do it," said Eisman.
- Burry didn't know who was to be left holding the bag from Goldman and others if the CDS turned out the way he thought. He knew Goldman wouldn't have done the deals if the risk was on them.....turns out it was AIG
- Goldman had created Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) which just lumped together a bunch of the mortgage bonds to supposedly mitigate the risk but that already happened with the mortgage bonds
- The did CDO's to get shit bonds re-rated as AAA
- The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of lower middle class America. For Wall St. it was a machine that turned lead into gold
- After a while they didn't need to do CDOs of mortgage bonds they did them on the CDS. This essentially created a market and money for banks out of nothing
- Ratings agencies didn't know how to rate these
- Lippmann although forced into the shorting of mortgage bonds by Deutsche realized it was a gold mine
- He couldn't convince others to short so he went to AIG to try and blow up the market so he could cash in

How to Harvest a Migrant Worker:
- Joe Cassano was the bullying prick CEO of AIG
- Gene Park asked people most closely tied to CDS what percentage of the loans were subprime. They were all saying 10-20%. No one knew it was 95%
- No one believed housing prices could fall nationally all at once
- Park convinced Cassano to stop insuring but they didn't unload what they had
- Lippmann went looking for others who agreed with his beliefs and ran into Eisman
- The simple measure of sanity in housing prices was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically in the US it ran around 3:1 by late 2004 it had risen nationally to 4:1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries. But the problem wasn't just that it was four to one. In Las Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami eight to one. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren't real buyers. They were speculators."

Accidental Capitalists:
- A smaller number of people, more than ten, fewer than twenty, made a straightforward bet against the entire multi trillion dollar subprime mortgage market and by extension the global financial system. In and of itself it was a remarkable fact: The catastrophe was foreseeable, yet only a handful noticed.
- The few who saw it coming could be traced back to Lippman, except Mike Burry
- "I loved the concept of shorting a bond because your downside is limited. Its an asymmetrical bet." Said Paulson. He was shocked how much easier and cheaper it was to buy a credit default swap than it was to sell short an actual cash bond even though they represented the exact same bet.
- Charlie Ledley got a hold of Lippman's presentation
- He and a few buddies began buying options they viewed as mispriced and built their own fortunes in a short time
- They eventually got Wall St to sell them CDS
- "It took us weeks to really grasp it because it was so weird. But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you cant prove it in a court of law. But its fraud." - Charlie Ledley
- They were even buying the AA tranches of the CDS and they were the first to do so because they realized they were no better than the BBB but cheaper
- "A lot of people when we called them said hey why don't you guys buy some stocks? They couldn't believe that these young guys wanted to buy not just CDS but CDS's so esoteric that no one else had bought it."
- They didn't realize yet that the bonds inside their CDOs were actually credit default swaps on the bonds, and so their CDO's werent ordinary CDOs but synthetic CDOs or that the bonds on which the swaps were based had been handpicked by Mike Burry and Steve Eisman and others betting against the market. In many ways they were still innocents.

Spiderman At The Venetian:
- Eisman met Wing Chau a CDO manager and thought he would be hurting with the housing prices falling because the CDO managers had filled the void left by AIG. But the CDO managers were selling to Institutional Clients. Everyone was passing the risk.
- "He 'managed' the CDOs. But managed what? I was just appalled that the structured finance market could be so insane to allow someone to manage a CDO portfolio without having any exposure to the CDOs. People would pay up to have soomeone 'manage' their CDOs as if this moron was helping you. I thought, you prick, you dont give a fuck about the investors in this thing." - Eisman talking about Wing Chau a CDO manager
- Chau's real job was to serve as a new kind of front man for the Wall St firms he "hired"; investors felt better buying a Merrill Lynch CDO if it didnt appear to be run by Merrill Lynch.
- After the dinner Eisman grabbed Greg Lippmann and said "Whatever that guy (Chau) is buying, I want to short it." Lippman took it as a joke but Eisman was serious. He wanted to specifically bet against Wing Chau. "I want to short his paper. Sight unseen."
"Usually when you do a trade you can find some smart people on the other side of it. In this instance we couldnt. Nobody we talked to had any credible reason to think this wasnt going to become a big problem. No one was really thinking about it." Cornwall Capital guys
- People believed the collapse of the subprime market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a tragedy.
- Eisman, "In Vegas it became clear to me that this entire huge industry was just trusting in the ratings so they didnt have to think about it."
- "You know how when you walk into a post office you realize there is such a difference between a government employee and other people? The ratings agency people were all like government employees." - Vinny
- "That was the moment when we said, 'Holy shit, this isnt just credit. This is a fictitious Ponzi scheme." - Vinny
- "There were more morons than crooks but the crooks were higher up." - Vinny and Eisman
- Eisman got back from Vegas and increased his shorts by $250M

The Great Treasure Hunt:
- Charley traded with Morgan Stanley and literally overnight they said they couldnt do CDS anymore.
- In a portfolio of 30 million Charley and Cornwall Capital owned 250 million and were disappointed they didnt own more
- Charley even went to the SEC but they didnt get it and never investigated
- "We always asked the same question. Where are the ratings agencies in all this? And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didnt want to say it. It was a smirk. They were just assuming home prices would keep going up," Eisman said.

The Long Quiet:
- Mike Burry had 1.9 billion in CDS and he shouldve been recieving money as the market took its lumps but since he was one of the only players Wall St was setting the market price of his shorts
- So he started asking to buy at the prices they were telling him his shorts were worth but of course they wouldnt sell him any more. It was BS.
- "One of the oldest adages in investing is that if youre reading about it in the paper it is too late. Not this time."
- Burry's investors all wanted their money back including partner Joel Greenblatt. When he locked up their funds from withdrawal they started organizing to sue.
- Wall St stopped responding for a few days then all called at once saying they wanted to ensure the value of his shorts were fair. They were getting in on the shorts themselves before the crash.
- "When I first started shorting these mortgages in 2005 I knew full well that is was not likely to pay out within two years. And for a very simple reason. The vast majority of mortgages originated in the last few years had a rather ominously attractive feature called the teaser rate period. Those 2005 mortgages are only now reaching the end of their teaser rate periods and it will be 2008 before the 2006 mortgages get there. What sane person on Earth would confidently conclude in early 2007, smack dab in the midst of the mother of all teaser rate scams that the subprime fallout will not result in contagion? The bill literally has not even come due." Burry
- "Nobody came back and said, 'Yeah you were right.' It was very quiet. It was extremely quiet. The silence infuriated me." Burry

A Death Of Interest:
- Howie Hubler of Morgan Stanley is profiled as the stereotypical trader with the blinders on
- "It was more than a little weird. There was a lot of angst about it. It was sort of viewed as, These folks dont know what theyre talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." Losses in Hublers group would eventually go to 40%.
- "They kept saying That state of the world cant happen!"
- "It is one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. Its another to bet on a form of red and not to know it."
- "They werent lying. They genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO
- Howie went on vacation and never came back. The losses left behind were 9 billion, the largest in Wall St history for a single trader
- The last buyer of subprime mortgage risk had stopped buying
- Cornwall began to worry Bear Stearns would go out of business and would be unable to pay up so they sought buyers of their CDOs.
- UBS offered 30 points up front. That means Cornwall's $205M in CDS were now worth $60M (30% of $205M) when it cost them only $1M to buy them
-"It's the first time were seeing any prices that reflect anything close to what they're really worth. We had positions that were being valued by Bear Stearns at six hundred grand that went to six million the next day." Charlie Ledley
- Mike Burry also started to make a killing. In a portfolio totalling $550M he maid $720M in one year
- "Even when it was clear it was a big year and I was proven right, there was no triumph in it. Making money was nothing like I thought it would be," said Mike. To his founding investor, Gotham Capital, he shot off an unsolicited email that said only, "Youre welcome." He'd already decided to kick them out of the fund and insist they sell their stake in his business. When they asked him to suggest a price, he replied, "How about you keep the tens of millions you nearly prevented me from earning for you last year and we call it even?"

Two Men In A Boat:
- "Being short in 2007 and making money from it was fun, because we were short bad guys. In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you dont want the system to crash. Its sort of like the floods about to happen and youre Noah. Youre on the ark. Yeah youre okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. Thats not a happy moment for Noah." - Eisman
- Frontpoint's fund went from $700M to $1.5B
- "What, the entire American population woke up one morning and said, 'Yeah I am going to lie on my loan application'? Yeah people lied. They lied because they were told to lie."
- Sept 18 2008 all hell was breaking loose
- Eisman sold all his CDS back to Lippmann two months earlier. They were now back to stock market investors and shorting all the banks. On the 18th minutes after opening they were up $10M
- "There wer no bids in the market for anything. There was no market. It was really only then I realized there was a bigger issue than just our portfolio. Fundamentals didnt matter. Stocks were going to move up or down on pure emotion and speculation of what the government would do." Danny
- They were a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley
- "I'm thinking, Weve got the world by the fucking balls and the company we work for is going bankrupt."
- Mike Burry and Scion earned invesors a 490% gain in 3 years but all his investors were pulling their money out
- He shut down his fund and vanished
- Eisman ran into Merrill's CFO Jeff Edwards and said "You remember what I said about those risk models of yours? I guess I was right huh?"
- "I felt bad about it. It was obnoxious. He was a lovely guy. He was just wrong. I was no longer the underdog. And I had to conduct myself in a different way." Eisman
- "The investment banking industry is fucked. These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. Its like being a scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along and one morning you wake up: 'Holy shit, I'm wrong!" Eisman

Everything Is Correlated:
- The worst part of the crisis is that everyone came out rich. All the guys who called it and they guys on the wrong side of the bet. Even those who ran their companies bankrupt
- "What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they dont need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions" The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; theyre still wrong."
- Handouts by the government
- "There's no limit to the risk in the market. A bank with a market capitalization of one billion dollars might have one trillion dollars' worth of credit default swaps outstanding. No one knows how many there are! And no one knows where they are!"
- Michael Lewis has lunch with an old associate who basically created the credit default swap. He is a former king of Wall St. Lewis says he is thinking about doing a book on the subprime, revisiting his old Liars Poker days. Wall St guy says, "I think we can agree about this; Your fucking book destroyed my career and it made yours."

Book Review: Mustaine

2010-09-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

I have gotten plenty of care packages since arriving in Iraq. Most have been snacks and toiletries which are always welcomed. However, I got the word out that I would like a steady influx of reading material and I certainly got my wish. I have received probably twenty books since arriving in Iraq so I have a plethora of different reads to choose from. A book that really caught my attention was sent out last month by my little brother Andy. Unfortunately, I had to make my way through a couple resume books that I had started in anticipation of next year's job search. But I knew that I soon as I finished the resume books that my brother's gift was next up in the queue.

The book that he sent me is entitled "Mustaine" by Dave Mustaine and Joe Laydon. The average person may not know who Dave Mustaine is, but any lover of metal will recognize the name as the frontman and rhythm guitarist of one of the greatest bands ever....Megadeth. The book is an autobiography of Mustaine's troubled yet amazing life.

The fall and rise of a heavy metal icon

Dave Mustaine is the first to admit that he's bottomed out a few times in his dark and twisted speed metal version of a Dickensian life.

Impoverished, transient childhood? Check.

Abusive, alcoholic parent? Check.

Mind-fucking religious weirdness (in his case the extremes of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Satanism)? Check.

Alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness? Check, check, check.

Soul-crushing professional and artistic setbacks? Check.

Rehab? Check (seventeen times, give or take).

Near-death experience? Check that one, too.

James Hetfield, with whom many years ago Mustaine founded a band known as Metallica, once observed, with some incredulity, that Mustaine must have been born with a horseshoe up his ass. That's how lucky he's been, how fortunate he is to be pulling breath after so many close calls. And Hetfield is right. Mustaine has been lucky. He has been blessed. But here's the thing about having a horseshoe lodged in your rectum: It also hurts like hell. And you never forget it's there.

Mustaine has battled through it all to achieve dizzying heights. From the early, heady days of Metallica, being unceremoniously let go only to become a world-famous rock star—founder, front man, singer, songwriter, and guitarist (and de facto CEO) for Megadeth, one of the most popular bands in heavy metal—Mustaine's is a story that will inspire, stun, and terrify.

I picked up this 346 page gem and finished it in less than four days. Part of that is due to the fact I have had a case of the flu and have had a bit more rest/read time than usual. But most of it is due to the fact that the book is a great read. Now I am definitely biased. I grew up listening to, and still listen to, a ton of metal music. Megadeth has consistently been in my playlist and there are a few Megadeth records that I regard as some of the best metal records ever recorded. I even wrote a letter to Dave Mustaine when I was 12 years old and included some lyrics I had written to get his thoughts. I totally forgot about the letter but then one day when I was 15 years old and well into high school I got a letter back from the man himself. I thought that was pretty cool. A real classy thing to do. Matching up the timeline of when I wrote the letter with the story of Dave's life in the book it is pretty safe to say that he was an embattled drug addict at this time. This paradox is one of the things that makes the read so powerful. Dave opens the door to his crazy life, revisiting all his sins and regrets, yet you put down the book realizing that there is a really good person behind the drugs, the fights, the family struggles, etc.

You are probably asking yourself, "why would I want to read a detailed account of the ascension of the Bay Area Thrash Metal Movement and one metalhead's crazy role during that period?" If you are a metalhead the answer is simple. This book is a historical glimpse into one of the most exciting periods in metal through the eyes of one it's founding fathers. If you aren't a metalhead let me tell you why you should give this book a chance. This book, while set to a heavy metal backdrop, does an incredible job of simultaneously showing man's incredible ability to survive and overcome while also showing just how truly fragile we all are. Dave is an embodiment of these polar opposite ends of the human condition and many of the lessons from the book transcend the 80's thrash metal scene in which the story is told. This book receives my highest recommendation for metal heads and non metalists alike.

Here are a few notes that I took from this great read:

A Horseshoe Up My Ass:
- He no longer loves music until it is taken away

Daddy Dearest:
- He has sympathy for addicts. "....this did not make him an evil man. A weak man, perhaps, and a man who did some bad things."
- He fell in love with music and had plenty of people against him and his passion

Reefer Madness:
- "I wanted to fit in and belong"
- His father died of brain trauma in a bar. Couldn't reach the family to save his life......no one cared about him.
- Sister told him he would end up just like his dad while his father was on his deathbed.

Lars & Me:
- Wanted to be the leader

Metallica:
- Metallica's ascent happened very fast
- Relocate the band for a bass player (Cliff Burton)? He was that good and we were that driven.

Dumped by Alcoholica:
- Its amazing how low they got on the trip to NJ
- When they kicked Dave out it was pretty ruthless
- He found the term Megadeth on a political pamphlet of the bus he was on back to California. Started writing what would become Set The World Afire.

Building the Perfect Beast - Megadeth:
- Caught in the lie that he had quit Metallica. But in that humbling moment he actually stated he wanted to start his own band. Inspiring moment that made him move forward.
- The drug induced life they lived sounds awful but you can see how easy it is to digress to that point

Mission: To Break All The Rules of God & Man:
- Chris Poland coined that mission statement

Familiarity Breeds Contempt:
- He learned the hard lessons of the music biz
- "All bands eventually break up because of one or more of the following: Power, Prosperity, Prestige, Pussy."
- Wrote In My Darkest Hour for Cliff Burton upon hearing news of his death
- He began to see that they couldn't go on like that forever

The End of Western Civilization:
- Alice Cooper told Mustaine he would either burn out or die
- It's pretty simple, really: when you are an addict, you don't listen to people. It doesn't matter what anyone else says or does. Very rarely will you find someone with a drug or alcohol problem who is easily influenced. Very rarely does the conversation go like this: "Hey man you should stop drinking and clean up your act." "Really? You mean I shouldn't get high and plow through this line of Swedish bikini models? Okay you're right. Ill stop. Thanks for looking out for me bro."
- Dave, even in a drug induced stupor, believed in merit

The Traveling Carnival:
- Even as a drug addict he expected people to be held accountable for their choices
- Talked about making up over the years and how when they look back they were all out of their minds

Against Medical Advice:
- I need help was something he thought he would never say

The Living Years:
- He is very passionate about his marriage

I Pray The Lord My Soul To Keep:
- Countdown to Extinction was #2 on the Billboard charts behind Billy Rae Cyrus
- He struggled with envy of Metallica

The Inner Weasel:
- Megadeth changed to a business entity

Soul For Sale:
- As they got more famous there were more and more money arguments

Some Kind of God:
- Metallica screwed him into doing Some Kind of Monster
- He would relapse after years of sobriety
- He realized family is what is truly important, not work
- "I allowed myself to become a victim"
- "I've seen the error of my ways and what drinking and drug use has done to me and my family, and what its done to my career and my body. Drinking and doing drugs, for me, makes about as much sense as pissing my pants on a winter's day: it'll feel good for a little while...until that cold wind begins to blow. And then it won't feel so great."

Megadeth Reborn:

Epilogue:
- "You know that old joke about the guy stranded in the flood, perched atop the roof of his house, waiting for God to save him? He repeatedly turns away rescue efforts based on the belief that God will personally take care of him. The floodwaters ultimately sweep him away and he winds up at heaven's gate, wondering why God has forsaken him. St. Peter looks at the poor guy and laughs. 'What are you talking about? We sent three boats and a helicopter.' I feel like the boat has come by for me more than a few times. Whether I deserved it or not, I had success with Metallica. I had success with Megadeth. I had success with Megadath again after my arm was wrecked. I have a wife who has stayed with me through some very hard times. And I have two healthy, happy children. So at some point you have to wonder: how many times does God have to say, 'Dude, I love you,' before I straighten up for good? I've got everything a man could want, and then some. It's time."

The Deployment Mirror - Part IV

2010-08-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Chapter I - Monday:

I wipe the sweat from my brow as the crew and I walk into the entryway of the guard shack leading into the dining facility (DFAC). I hand my ID to a Ugandan guard in a SOC uniform. He adjusts the loaded AK-47 on his shoulder, glances up at my face to ensure I am who I say I am and returns the card to me. I walk around the corner and into the DFAC to wash my hands. The paper towel saturates and rips leaving remnants of wet paper stuck to my fingers as I open the door into the dining facility. For some reason all the paper towels over here are the consistency of toilet paper. One of the small annoyances that whispers in your ear not so reassuringly reminding you that you are not in the comforts of home.

I scan my ID as I enter and am hit with the smell of DFAC. It is not an entirely bad smell but the multiple visits a day cause the smell to become an all too constant presence in the groundhog day that has become my life. I grab a tray, a plastic plate and silverware, and make my way briskly over to scan the line.

"Chicken sandwich day dude!" Heichs yells from behind me. Like a bird returning to the flock I swiftly alter course and head to the chicken sandwich bar that has become a regular on Monday's. We spread out and grab our various drinks, salads, and other items and reconvene in the back hall that somehow has a bit better air conditioning than the main area. We find and open table and plop down for a much welcomed break from the monotony of the contracting workload.

We sit down and start catching up on the few hours we have been dispersed carrying out our separate niches within the organization. The hustle and bustle of the various troops and contractors in the DFAC provides a backdrop of noise and movement that at first was overwhelming but is now the norm. The conversion inevitably turns to stories about contracting, another glaring reminder that I am deployed. Our job serves as our lowest common denominator of shared experiences and thus is often the topic of conversation. This is out of necessity and definitely not out of enjoyment. I have recognized a pattern in our conversations though. We often start with a contracting story. The story then leads to complaining. Not the type of complaining that comes from tainted and bitter people, but the kind that arises from those that are hungry and impatient with bureaucracy, injustice, and plain idiocy. The topic of conversation inevitably leads to higher ideals and principles that transcend our common deployed experiences and align more with our common human experiences and values.

I am amazed at how no matter where we start we end up talking about very high level, simple shared topics. We start bitching about contracting, navigate our way into strategic discussion on the way the war is being fought and how we fit into it. We then talk about what we would do if we were king for a day, and inevitably end up talking about our life goals and values like happiness, the importance of family, fulfillment, cultivating human relationships, and experiencing this gift of life that we are given.

I am no Socrates or Aristotle, but some of my best memories from this chapter of my life will definitely be centered on those shared discussions with my peers. People will want to hear about my travels to the desert. They will want to know how hot it was, how the palaces looked, and if I met any 'real' Iraqis. I will patiently answer their queries as these experiences will undoubtedly be cherished. But my foresight tells me that my best feel good moments will be the connections I established with my buddies and those moments in time where we got a glimpse into each other's souls and recognized the ideals we all shared; the things that are truly important to living an amazing and fulfilling life.

"You guys ready?" I ask the group. We stand up in concert and take our trays over to the industrial garbage cans lining the exits. I push open the swinging door and am once again blasted with a combination of dust, intense sunlight, and heat that pulls me back to the reality of where I am at. We head back to the vehicle and make the drive back to the office.

To Be Continued....

The Deployment Mirror - Part III

2010-08-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

Chapter I - Monday:

My Friends and I stride into the relatively newly constructed building we more or less have called home since our arrival. It is hardened for protection against mortar and rocket attacks and has powerful although relatively unstable air conditioning. The cool air engulfs me and I can feel the heat radiating from my uniform. My body reacts by emitting thin glaze of sweat that soaks my boxers and undershirt. We trek upstairs and through the door into our office.

My office in Iraq looks relatively similar to that of my office at Hanscom Air Force Base just outside of Boston. However, the workload is definitely a change from the comfortable pace stateside. The way I describe my workload to family and friends is that there is more work to be done that could ever be accomplished. So you put your head down sift through what is most important and give it your best. Strangely my mental pendulum swings between being overwhelmed and relaxed by the reality that there is more work than can be realistically accomplished.

I log into my computer and shove aside the two contract files that have accumulated sometime in between my nine o'clock departure last night and my eight o'clock arrival this morning. Many of the CACI contractors who work in my office opt for a to go breakfast in order to start their clock early. Two of my team members have already placed a file on my desk for review and release. I open my email and see that I have 22 new messages. I quickly delete a few base wide messages detailing upcoming 5k runs, magic shows, and road closures. I continue and delete 5 or 6 messages from Iraqi contractors who somehow know that I am a contracting officer and email me daily for new work.

My career, although extremely frustrating at times, does serve a very important function especially in these new times of war. Nothing works on base without Contracting. From generators to internet service to security guards. There is some pride and definitely some heavy responsibility that comes with that reality. Seeing as though we are spending government money there is also an immense amount of bureaucracy to deal with that has grown like a virus over the last hundred years or so of government contracting. It has become more of an art than a science to learn to navigate the complicated and often conflicting guidance of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. One begins to get a taste of how Washington works while being involved in government contracting. Most laws and legislation are enacted out of reaction to scandals, protests, and other issues that have forced our nations leaders to do something to prevent such a thing from happening again. But the fallacy is that you can reactively legislate to proactively prevent. There will always be new challenges and new scandals. As the rules change so do the problems associated with those rules. And thus it becomes more and more difficult to execute what needs to be done. Being in the desert brings you even closer to the way Washington works as you can trace the numerous taskers and requests for information right back to DC. It is frustrating to say the least.

I put my headphones and crank some metal tunes to start my day off on the right foot. A few interruptions and a few hours later and I get up to take a break. I look over at Bob who strolled in around nine all sweaty from the walk over and ask him if he is ready. It is his last week in Baghdad before he heads home. We talk for a bit and his departure begins to give me hope of my own successful return home. He has helped me from the day I arrived and I think back just a few short months ago and I can't believe how settled I am in this strange world. The human spirit is an amazing thing. We naturally adapt to the situations and challenges around us. We are on a constant quest for normalcy, for a peace of mind. Yet we are also constantly striving to become better and to grow through new and unique experiences. It is an interesting dynamic that I have become not only aware of but dependent on throughout my short but eventful time on this earth. Just knowing that in the most stressful and clouded times of your life that you can and will overcome is a good feeling. It doesn't always ensure those times will be easy but it keeps you moving forward.

"You ready for lunch," I lean over and ask Bob. "Yeah, give me a second," he replies. I walk off and around the office gathering the rest of the Captain crew. We exit the office loudly, joking around as we make our way out to the car to drive to lunch. The midday heat is almost unbearable this time of year and the buildup of government vehicles on base which was source of shock when I first arrived has now become a saving grace. Another half day down and one step closing to coming home.....

To Be Continued....

The Deployment Mirror - Part II

2010-08-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 - Monday:

I step outside my room and am once again slapped with the thick Iraq air. "Bob's not coming?" I ask Heichs and Sheeman. "What do you think?" Heichs replies. Bob has said he is coming to breakfast for the last week only to come franticly rushing into the office at about 9:10, sweating while explaining that he meant to sleep in.

The three of us begin the half mile walk to the DFAC (dining facility) sans Bob. We walk along the dusty road outside our CHU's on the way to the paved road and are blasted with a dust cloud from speeding F-250. "Fucking Joe Contractor," I say jokingly. We bring up the comfortable and common topic that we have been in this war so long that even our contractors have developed a noticeable obnoxious sense of entitlement. My worldly, witty peers and I seem to never to tire discussing our loathing of the stereotypical and aptly named "Joe Contractor."

Joe Contractor is a middle aged overweight male who has spent years working in Iraq and making a fortune. While his role is important and no doubt necessary to our efforts he acts as if the base is a contractor Disneyland. He drives an F-250 or a new SUV all over the base and never has anyone else in the vehicle. His gas is paid for by the US Government and is placed in a vehicle that the US Government leased but will eventually end up buying for more than we would have paid if we bought it off the lot from the beginning. Joe Contractor eats in the DFAC and always grabs two to go boxes full of food. My friends and I joke that we are not only paying these guys to get fat but that in 15 years they will hit us again as their healthcare costs make their way down to our level. The face of America's wars have changed since my Grandparents era, that much is certain. Our politicians make decisions based on votes and not on reality, and thus must fill capability gaps with Joe Contractors. These same politicians then slam our finest Generals during televised review boards over the amount of contractor personnel in theatre. This is not my Grandfathers' war.

We arrive at the DFAC, sweating from the heat that is substantial even before 7:30 AM. We hand our ID cards to the Ugandan guards with AK47's that man all the entrances to the public facilities. They too are contracted help. In fact the majority of the security over here is. Another strange departure from my dreams of what deployment would be like. They ensure that we are carrying our weapons and return our cards. We make our way through the breakfast line and plop down together to carry on our morning conversation.

My buddies in Iraq have been a saving grace. I was so paranoid that I would not find the friendship and camaraderie I so desperately needed in my first deployment. However, my fears were for naught. My peer group has not only been there as a friendly boost getting me through these tough times away from home, but they have made me proud of my generation that has chosen to serve. My fellow Captains are well educated, intrinsically motivated, have handled a large amount of responsibility at a very young age, and have done it well. We feed off each other's drive to succeed and we are competitive in a friendly and healthy way. Our group has developed a personality. An identity that arises amongst solid individuals with similar goals and values. We walk with a bit of a swagger. A little bit of attitude that we are destined to great things now and in the future. It feels good. We are cynical in a sense, disenfranchised with the things we see around us. However, I see us as more idealistic than anything as our most cynical moments stem from a frustration that things can be done better. We often find ourselves starting on observations that are close to our sphere of influence only to find ourselves miles above thinking of the big picture, how what we are doing fits into this crazy world, and how we want to make it better. My buddies here are guys that will undoubtedly go down different life paths and different journeys than me, however they are the kind of buddies that I will forever be honored to work with in any future endeavor, no matter the time lapsed between our last exchange.

It is a great feeling to be surrounded by great people. I live my life by constantly surrounding myself with good people. Being deployed is interesting because it amplifies normal life. You need about 10% of the time you normally need to read somebody through and through. With that enhanced people reading capability comes the good the bad and the ugly. I have used my time to see what I do and do not want to become as a person.

I finish my eggs, bacon, and mound of fresh fruit and we head for the exit. We begin the walk back to our office building and I can't help but notice how good the eucalyptus trees smell in the morning. I gaze to my left and see the man made lake that Saddam built. Victory Base Complex is showered with palaces, lakes, and a few leftover trees, all of which are out of place but are aesthetically pleasing nonetheless. I had heard that at one point Saddam stole 80% of Baghdad's water supply to create the clean water lakes that line what is now Victory. For an asshole he really knew how to decorate the place. I think how amazing the grounds must have looked before we got here. I wonder what they will look like after we leave. I am feeling grateful and thankful for the amenities that I have had on my first deployment. It is amazing how a little sunlight, a full belly, and a little walk in the morning can cheer you up....even with a 12-14 hour day ahead of you. We get to our building door and the day begins.

To Be Continued...

The Deployment Mirror - Part I

2010-07-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my wife the other day and she asked me why I never write about being deployed? I didn't really have an answer for her. I guess I don't really think that my day to day activities are that exciting. When I told her that she said that she is constantly getting asked by friends and family what my life is like over here. She explained that she often did have answers to the little questions that people ask. That moment kind of made me feel bad like I hadn't let the ones I care about into my life over here enough. Perhaps I had been too concerned with my own sanity by wanting to know everything that was happening "on the outside" without me, and not concerned enough with giving my family and friends a glimpse into the world that has become my own over these last three months. After than conversation I actually started to get excited about the possibilities of writing a week in the life of post. My vision is to have the post read much less like a checklist of events and more like an experience through my senses. I haven't written in this fashion very often and I do not really know where this is going, so hopefully it turns out to be good. If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.

Chapter 1 - Monday:
The wave is bright and swift. Dragging me upwards like a powerful fluid vine ascending rapidly towards a destination unknown. The awful noise started far off at first. A repetitive wailing that approached me with a hunter's precision. Familiarity crept into my mind, yet I still could not place the sounds flooding my memory. The light pulling me upwards increased its intensity and my pace exponentially increased. I could feel my heart beating faster as the pulsating far off noise that plagued my mind intensified. As my rapid heartbeat hit a final note my eyes clicked wide open in unison. I was awake. My Westclox battery powered alarm clock had reached the second stage alarm that was even more annoying and awful sounding than the first set of beeps.

I had been having intense and very strange dreams since arriving in Baghdad almost three months ago. Some weird, some good, and few awful night terrors. It is amazing how diet, long hours, and intense workouts can change your sleep patterns. I leaned over and turned off the alarm and saw that it was 6:22 AM. I had made it through two minutes of my mind piercing alarm while struggling to surface from my ethereal dream. I reached for my laptop and cracked it open. My email account, left open from the night before, had six new messages. After deleting a couple LinkedIn updates and a Walmart.com promotion I started to read an email from Chris, a friend who works with me on Checking For Charity. As great as it was to see the charity I helped create flourishing in my absence, it also stung a bit being separated from it. The opportunity to be a part of something like my charity is just one of the many things I took for granted just three short months ago.

I open my Skype account and double click the Heidicell icon. It rings three times and I hear the voice I love hearing every morning. Luckily my room is equipped with wireless internet capability, which has made Skype a godsend for myself and countless members of the armed forces before me. I quickly think of the experiences both my Grandfathers had during World War II and feel a bit of guilt for my "wartime" amenities. My guilt is rapidly washed away by my wife's voice. We are on a ten hour time difference so the call times actually work out relatively well. We talk during my morning time and at least once during my night hours. I wonder how much harder my experience would be if I didn't have the chance to talk to her at will?

We catch up on her day and what her plans are for the week. She asks what my plans are for the week. I say little and quickly change the subject. For some reason it has proven difficult to share to her and my family back home. Maybe their lives are my only escape? Maybe I am just to lazy to try explain experiences out here that are relatively mundane and do not exactly lift my spirits? I tell her I love her and that I have to get ready for work.

I get out of my bed catch the unpleasant whiff of whatever chemical they use while boiling my laundry. My legs are still stiff from Saturday's workout. I walk over to the small TV that was left behind in my room that is used more for a nightstand than anything else and I grab my electronic razor. I step around to the side of my wall locker where I have taped up a cheap mirror from the base exchange and I begin to shave. My beard has been ridiculous out here. I have five o'clock shadow by noon every day. I attribute my enhanced beard growth to shaving seven days a week. No full days off out here. I finish shaving and gather a few clothes off of the floor to place in my laundry bag. I look around my CHU (containerized housing unit) and think how appalled my wife would be if our room looked like this at home. I have had little free time since I arrived at the Victory Base Complex almost three months ago and even less time that I am willing to spend organizing my trailer. For me, it was good enough.

I threw on my bathrobe and flip flops, always a conversation starter out here, grabbed my shower caddy and opened front door to head towards the showers. My face is slapped with the thick desert air. Baghdad is hot. There is no way around it. I have been to Arizona, California, Mexico, Jamaica, and numerous other places all of which are pretty hot during their summer months, however there is not a place on earth that I have found that has hotter air than Iraq. Every day feels like a hot blow dryer is being directed right in your face. Luckily, I have just left the confines of my CHU where I have had an oversized air conditioner pumping in cold air since I arrived in May. The warmth actually feels good against my face. I turn around and lock my CHU door, not out of fear of theft during my time in the shower, but because my Beretta M9 and clips of ammunition are laying on the empty bed on the other side of my room. Another reminder that life is a little different out here.

I walk through the dusty gravel that has become my city's concrete out here and across my 'street' to the shower trailer. I weave through the giant concrete T-walls used to protect the CHU's from mortar and rocket attacks. The door slams shut behind me and I am greeted by the overpowering stench of mold and sitting water. I see Heichs' and Sheeman's towels and shorts hanging from their respective favorite shower stalls. "What's up rookies," I shout out. "Did you check out the new quotes," asks Heichs. I quickly gaze over to the wall and see the picture of a not so loved senior officer that recently returned home. Someone put up her picture with some quotations next to it. We gave up trying to figure out who did it a few weeks back. The weekly addition of new quotes next to the picture speaks volumes of the impact she had on the culture and morale of the office, especially since her peers frequent these same showers and had yet to take her pseudo shrine down. Her mocked persona is a blunt lesson in leadership, just one of the many I have been exposed to in my short time in the desert.

I jump in the shower and begin the challenging task of adequately washing in the 2x2 foot shower stall. The water pressure is good but it is difficult to wash without banging loudly against the cheap plastic stalls. I am grateful for a daily shower though. I rinse off and brush my teeth in the shower and crack a few jokes with the boys before walking back to my CHU. The heat has become a bit less pleasurable as my hours of nightly air conditioning exposure begins to wear. I unlock my CHU and catch a glimpse of the clock that plagued my dreams just a short while ago. It reads 7:01 AM. I had nine minutes to get dressed and head to breakfast.

I throw on my ABU's (airman battle uniform) and curse the bastard who designed it. The winter weight denim texture is a slap in the face to those out in Iraq. We can spend billion's on a war effort but we can't even give deployed troops a non-winter weight uniform in Baghdad. The Navy did it right by adopting the Army's lightweight, athletic cut uniform. The Air Force tried to develop their own identity and instead developed a camouflage horse blanket. The uniform had become a constant gripe amongst our crowd. I think back to the other amenities I have and the fact I am walking into my own room and immediately feel the guilt creep back into my psyche. I wash down a daily vitamin and cruise Facebook for a few minutes before the guys stop by and grab me on the way to breakfast. The social networking site is both a blessing and a curse while deployed. It can be a great way to remain connected to people stateside. It is a way to feel that you are still a part of people's lives stateside. But it can also serve as a constant reminder that your time over here is time away from the life you have built, and it is time that you will never get back.

My guilt is eased slightly by the realization that with the new ways of war come new challenges. My Grandfathers' way of war is gone, and with it the unique challenges they faced. My situation is what it is and all I can do is get by the best I can. The true sacrifice is being away from those you care about. It isn't the lack of everyday conveniences we as a nation have become so accustomed to. People always say that life is like a roller coaster. You are always faced with the ups and downs. If life is like a roller coaster, then deployed life is the biggest damn roller coaster I have ever been on. The ups and downs are much more frequent and they seem to be more intense, if only just in my mind. My morale and daily mood is of constant importance and I try to actively ensure that I am balanced mentally. I cannot imagine the effects that some of my Army brethren are going through 'outside the wire'. Once again, I feel bad for my self pity. Be grateful for what you have, I tell myself before....

Bang, bang, bang. The door handle rattles back and forth after the obnoxious knock of my friends. I stand up and shut down my laptop. It is time to head to breakfast.

To Be Continued.....

Checking For Charity Beef & Beer Tickets Now On Sale!

2010-07-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Help selling tickets to the Checking For Charity inaugural Beef & Beer event. Tickets are on sale NOW!

Here are the details:

Thursday August 19th from 6-10pm
PJ Whelihans in Cherry Hill
Chinese Auction, 50/50 raffle, games, food and more.
All the beer you can drink.
Cost is $30 per person in advance. $40 at the door.
We expect a BIG Turnout for this event and are not restricted to one room at PJ'S. Our goal is to sell over 250 tickets.

So go out and sell tickets.....wife, girlfriend, family, friends and co-workers.
Ticket sales will be by Pay Pal on our website www.checkingforcharity.com or by sending a check to:

Checking for Charity Corporation
PO Box 31
Mount Laurel NJ 08054

**Please make your check payable to "Checking for Charity**

When you arrive at PJ's your name will be on the paid in full list. Get a wristband and have fun.

See you there....now go out there and buy/sell some tickets!

Book Review: Start Where You Are

2010-07-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

"Start Where You Are" is a book by Chris Gardner of The Pursuit of Happyness fame. I saw the movie and enjoyed it, however I never really sought out to find the book let alone a different book by the author. However during a long layover in Baltimore on my way out the door to my deployment I purchased Chris' book from the airport newsstand.

The book is described as a book that contains life lessons on getting from where you are to where you want to be. Although the book has some valuable lessons, I almost think I would have benefited more from reading the Pursuit of Happyness than Start Where You Are. For me it was one of those books that probably could have been written in about half as many pages. There were six separate sections with 42 lessons. Some of these lessons were pretty cool and told over the backdrop of Chris's unique life story definitely brings them into context. However, I felt like a lot of them were relatively mundane and repetitive. I almost got the vibe that the publisher mandated that the book be a certain length and left Chris to go back and fill in the gaps. The overarching message is clear. You should always pursue happyness, your destiny is in your hands, and start now! I just think that message could have been delivered a bit more succinctly. Overall, it was a fairly good read. Like I said before I think gleaning many of the lessons from Chris' life story would have been more impactful than having those lessons told to me through Chris's writing. But that just may be my learning style. I have included some notes from the book below.

Overture - Come In:
- Why not let the world be our true classroom? It offers everything we need for attaining our greatest good and highest aspirations.
- Whenever I am asked what happyness is to me, my first answer is that it is the ability to look where I am in the moment, wherever I am, to remember where I came from and how far I've travelled, as a father, a friend, a contributing citizen of the world and to be able to say - what a beautiful life this is, I'm so grateful to be here. More than anything happyness is being able to appreciate everything and know - wow, I created this!

One: Start Where You Are:
- "Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you're ahead." - Will Rogers
- The present throws out a welcome mat as an equal opportunity invitation to come into your own
- Every stage of the journey in what has been my life so far was exactly where I needed to be at that time

Lesson 1: Without a Plan a Dream is Just a Dream:
- The Navy gave me an education and taught me the fundamentals of pursuing those possibilities - discipline, character and initiative, all transferable skills that would serve me in every pursuit to come
- What is the single most important ingredient for successful pursuit? A plan!
- C5 complex: Clear, Concise, Compelling, Committed, Consistent

Lesson 2: We All Have The Power of Choice:
- We all have the power of choice in determining who we ultimately become

Lesson 3: The Calvary Ain't Coming:
- Reclaim the self reliant attitude that made him a hero in the first place
- Own up to where you are and how you got there. 9 times out of 10 I have come to the conclusion that wherever I am Ive arrived there by choice. Only then can you move to change your situation

Lesson 4: Start With What You've Got in Your Hand:
- Resourcefulness is next to godliness
- Believe in yourself and the infinite abundance of resources already at your disposal

Lesson 5: Baby Steps Count Too, As Long As You Go Forward:
- "Its always best to make friends before you need friends"
- MLK - "You may not see the entire staircase, but it is important that you that first step."

Lesson 6: Stop Digging Your Potatoes:
- Its often much easier to stay in our comfort zones, even when we've stopped being very comfortable, simply because it takes less effort to stay where we don't want to be than to summon the energy required to create the change to go where wed rather be
- Change is necessary for growth and if we don't instigate the change that we desire for ourselves, the status quo will eventually change on its own - in ways that can make adapting even tougher
- People want others to validate that their breaking the status quo will be successful and that they're ready, but no one can provide that
- "I was convinced the best was still ahead of me." - Ray Kroc

Lesson 7: What Would The Champ Do?:
- Meets Mohammed Ali and asks him if hes ever been scared
- "Yeah. I'm scared now. Ive got a disease and there is no cure. But I am still fighting" - Mohammed Ali

Lesson 8: Say Peace Be Still:
- The only way we can discover our true power is by living through the crisis we fear

Lesson 9: Even Lewis and Clark Had a Map:
- Start with the maps of others and eventually you will create your own path
- Don't be ashamed to copy your heroes

Lesson 10: Find Your Button:
- There is no plan B for passion, do what you love and love what you do
- There is nothing more practical than harnessing the power of passion
- You can and deserve to love something so much you'd do it for free

Two: The Thorny and Golden Past:
-History is a guide to navigation in perilous times

Lesson 11: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Yesterday?:
- He revealed things from his past he never had while speaking to middle school

Lesson 12: In Your Library of Resources Value All Experiences:
- Everything we've experienced is relevant and part of who we are whether we like it or not
- "All true learning is experience. Everything else is just information." - Einstein
- "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandella

Lesson 13: Draw the Line of Your Life:
- Draw a line and illustrate important events and choices along the way
- Mark an X at critical decision points. You will see its your decisions driving your line not the other way around

Lesson 14: Whose Child Are You?:
- Your identity is important

Lesson 15: Check Out Your Own Version of Genesis:
- "Forgive your enemies but never forget their names." - JFK

Lesson 16: Who's Who in Your Hood?:
- "Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." - Henry Ford
- The more you appreciate everyone who has played even a modest role in your past- whether to reinforce, challenge, entertain, or inspire you - the more you can trust you have touched them as well

Lesson 17: The Red or the Yellow Bike:
- Don't go with what is safe. Go with what motivates you

Lesson 18: Sometimes You Gotta Give Up Christmas:
- 1. Know yourself (authority) 2. Be yourself (authenticity) 3. Choose for yourself (autonomy)

Lesson 19: No Test No Testimony:
- Life happens
- If you haven't been tested you have nothing to say and nothing to add value to the conversation
- "....the world is messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around....But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period....in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding --something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up." - MLK

Three: Hitting The Anvil:
- "I learned the value of hard work by working hard." - Margaret Mead
- There is no secret to success or only the elite would be able to attain it and that is not the case
- Success is the result of tactical and strategic applications of learned knowledge toward objectives pursued with passion

Lesson 20: The Law of Hard Work Is No Secret:
- Initiative is available to EVERYONE!
- I went to school with every man I ever talked to

Lesson 21: Core Strengths Forged on your Anvil:
- Confidence is one of those intangibles that can take individuals much farther that the skills or experiences on their resumes indicate they will go
- Confidence is a transferable strength

Lesson 22: Wizards Begin as Blacksmiths:
- Invest in your transferable skills

Lesson 23: Are You Bold Enough to Get Back to Basics?:
- He was going door to door when no one else on Wall St was

Lesson 24: Supply and Demand Ain't Rocket Science:
- Everybody's got their hustle. What they are providing the market
- Everybody is selling something

Lesson 25: Truth is a Hit:
- Effective communication needs a message so low that a goat could get it. Lowest common denominator
- Speak from the heart and only what you are truly passionate about
- Truth is a hit
- Truth, honesty, and integrity always make good business sense

Lesson 26: Learn the Ropes First, Then Conquer Rome:
- Top attribute employers look for is passion
- Its not how fast you get to the top but the wisdom you gain along the way

Lesson 27: Who's Who at the Office and in Your Spheres of Influence?:
- Its always best to make friends before you need friends

Lesson 28: It Takes As Much Energy to Bag an Elephant as it Does a Mouse:
- Don't sweat the small stuff
- Focus on elephants rather than mice

Lesson 29: Share the Wealth:
- Give back with advice and time and shared struggles

Four: Your Empowerment Zone:
- "One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself." - Leonardo Da Vinci

Lesson 30: Seek The Farthest Star:
- To achieve mastery you must see the upsides and downsides and take the risk anyways to go for the gold
- The experience of failure not only teaches how to succeed the next time it is the only way to combat the fear of failure

Lesson 31: Seeing Ghosts Reading Signs:
- Reinvention

Lesson 32: Opportunities, Like Pancakes Are Best Served Hot, But Sometimes You Gotta Set The Table Before You Can Eat:
- I also believe no matter what your endeavor, when you're open to possibilities that can and do show up on your doorstep, all the elements of timing can click for you too

Lesson 33: Stay Open But Don't Wing It:
- Dare to pursue your life's work but do so with a readiness to adapt your plans when needed on the fly

Lesson 34: Mo' Money Mo' Options Mo' Problems:
- Pursue mastery over money
- 1. Does it control you or do you control it? 2. Do you work hard for the money or do you let your money go to work for you? 3. Does money represent the calvary that you've been waiting on or is it only one resource in your pursuit of happyness
- Seek balance

Lesson 35: Money Is The Least Significant Component of Wealth:
- Success is nothing more than doing the little things that unsuccessful people don't do
- Only you can determine your true worth

Lesson 36: Conscious Capitalism: A Personal and Global Primer:
- The caveman with the biggest cave and the best stuff isn't necessarily the happiest
- Contribution makes you happy
- 1. The opportunity to create value for ourselves 2. The opportunity to add value to the world
- Will it have mattered that I was here?

Lesson 37: Make Your Dream Bigger Than Yourself:
- Be the change you want to see
- Don't always seek a mentor be one!

Five: Spiritual Genetics:
- You don't have to subscribe to a religion to be spiritual

Lesson 38: Embrace The Best of Your Spiritual Genetics:
- We all have our lightness and our darkness. Our human challenge is to continuously claim the light of the best that is within us - the best of our spiritual genetics
- "I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me."
- Alliance for a New Humanity website has instructions to meditate

Lesson 39: Breaking Generational Cycles:
- When confronting tough choices or circumstances we a. emerge and rise b. be beaten into darkness c. maintain the status quo

Lesson 40: Your Divine Inheritance:

Lesson 41: God's In The Details:

Lesson 42: Passing The Torch, Raising The Bar:
- Go make yourself Proud!

Six: The Good Old Everyday:
- "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Would the child that you were respect the man that you have become?

Lesson 43: Don't Postpone Joy:
- Do one thing for yourself that makes you happy
- Do one thing that makes you happy every day. Top of your daily to do
- Don't spend too much time pursuing whats next and not appreciating whats now

Lesson 44: Claim Ownership of Your Dreams:
- Happyness is a responsibility
- "Paid the price to control the dice, paid the cost to be the boss." - BB King
- Always pursue happyness!

Mental Balance And A Growing Trend

2010-06-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I have posted. What can I say? I have been busy. I don't mean to sound like one of those people who always say they too busy to do something, but in actuality whatever they are too busy for just is not that important to them to begin with. I think my commitment to blogging over the past year or so has demonstrated how important writing, learning, and introspection are to me. I must admit that I have consciously chosen to not be committed to consistent posts. I like to think that I am fairly tough mentally, however being put through adversity always does wonders for the psyche as it both builds confidence and strength while simultaneously reminding you just how fragile you actually are. My day to day life over here in the desert has been hard on me. By all accounts I feel fairly blessed to have the deployment set up that I have. There are others who have it much worse. However, working fourteen hour days with a few meals and a workout thrown in for good measure leaves limited personal time to work with. I have found that I have to consciously monitor my mental well being out here much more closely than my normal life. You have to take care of yourself mentally. You have to let loose a bit at night through simple activities taken for granted stateside. Whether it is watching a World Cup game with the boys, playing an hour or two of guitar, or just reading in silence for an hour before bed I have felt the heightened importance of decompressing activities that counteract the increased life tempo I am experiencing in Baghdad. Couple that commitment to a balanced mental state with a strong commitment to dedicating time to the ones I love back home and there just isn't much time I am willing to sacrifice for consistent writing. Life is all about choices right?

With all that being said I have made a commitment to writing when something ignites that spark within and gets the gears churning upstairs. I was forwarded an article today that inspired me to sit down and get back at it. The article I am referring to was published on the NPR website at the end of last month about corporate America's growing appetite for recruiting junior military officers. You can read the article or listen to the podcast in its entirety here.

There are many things that frustrate me about being a junior military officer. I am often frustrated by the bludgeoning bureaucracy of the military. I am often disenfranchised with a system that has limited options for which to distinguish great performers from the average and poor. However, as I look back on my relatively short career I cannot help but be grateful for the incredible opportunities I have been afforded during my service. I think of all the other 27 (28 tomorrow) year olds I know that never served and the great majority just aren't put in the leadership roles that junior military officers are at such a young age.

KAUFMAN: From Amazon to Unilever, dozens of other Fortune 500 companies are also wooing these officers. Rene Brooks recruits military talent for many of them.

Ms. RENE BROOKS (Recruiter): They say there is no room for a failure. And they feel like these junior officers who have immense challenges under their belt, who understand accountability, mean you must get results, these are the kind of people that they prefer to hire.

KAUFMAN: In the military, young officers hone their decision-making skills by making lots of tough calls, sometimes with life or death consequences. Even Zadack, who wasn't in combat, made recommendations about who in her unit would be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Mike Useem who teaches leadership at the Wharton School says the young officers have their decisions scrutinized all the time through after-action reviews. They quickly learn what works, what doesn't and why. And says Useem, they have a strong sense of mission.

Professor MIKE USEEM (Leadership, Wharton School): And people do acquire this amazing ability to cut to the chase and say, look, here are the steps in this order we really have to take to make this happen.

Obviously I am excited in that I am currently a junior military officer, but I am also excited that corporate America is beginning to recognize the value that I see in so many of my peers. I love the fact that the military focuses so intently on character and leadership. I have seen why this approach is so beneficial first hand. People who have good character and leadership skills can always learn new jobs and skills. The military environment is full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Military leaders are often thrust into new jobs, new positions, new areas of responsibility and are forced to adapt quickly. I think military leaders are used to dealing with change, and change at a high operations tempo. When you have the ability to successfully navigate new challenges rapidly and have a solid base of character and leadership skills I think you are a valuable member of the team no matter what that team is.

KAUFMAN: On a recent afternoon, Zadack was conducting an employee team meeting at the Wal-Mart store in St. Helens, Oregon. At 27, she's one of the company's youngest store managers. Ordinarily it takes years to become a manager, but
Zadack did it in just six months, this in spite of the fact that she knew nothing about retail when she was hired.

Ms. ZADACK: No. I'm not even one who really shops very much. And honestly, I had never even set foot in a Wal-Mart.

KAUFMAN: But she had overseen training missions involving hundreds of soldiers, making sure transportation was in place, meals were hot and that everyone from cooks to intel officers learned what they needed to know. She kept tabs on millions of dollars of equipment spread across eight different sites and often had to show that she was in charge.

Ms. ZADACK: People assume that in the military you would just say jump and they'd say, how high? That's not the truth. You have to buy in, no matter what organization you're a part of. So it's different, of course, but it's not tremendously so because people are people.

KAUFMAN: Junior military officers learn to accomplish a variety of assignments quickly. In the process, they learn flexibility, responsibility and accountability.

Mr. GARY PROFIT (Former Brigadier General, U.S. Army): Each of these young men and women has benefitted from a large national investment in his or her leadership capabilities.

KAUFMAN: Former Brigadier General Gary Profit is in charge of military recruiting for Wal-Mart. He describes the junior officer corps made up primarily of captains and lieutenants as the largest, diverse, talent-rich pool in the world. And two years ago, the giant retailer launched an aggressive effort to recruit the young officers.

Earlier this month I read a similar article that garnered the cover story of March's Fortune Magazine. The article, titled Meet The New Face Of Business Leadership, cites some interesting statistics that certainly caught my eye. According to the article in 1980 59% of America's large publicly traded company CEO's had military experience. By 2006 that number had decreased to 8%. The large representation of board room veterans in the 80's was attributed to a WWII generation that learned valuable lessons in leadership during a time of war. Could the resurgence in junior military officer recruitment today be attributed to a new generation of leaders whose skills were honed in two wars? The Fortune article seems to present that argument. However, the article also attributes the recent aggressive recruiting push to the nature of American business itself. With the prevalent character and ethical voids visible for all to see many corporations are looking for people that can handle today's fast paced environment, and can do so with integrity. Seeing as the military is consistently one of the institutions that the nation has the most confidence in, 82% according to Fortune, the junior military officer recruiting play seems like a natural fit

I think everyone has experiences that are unique and valuable to a team, however there are many military experiences that just cannot be replicated in other environments. Does this make military veterans more valuable than the next person? Not necessarily, but the transcendent skill sets that many veterans possess would certainly make them unique and valuable members of many of the high performing organizations the nation has to offer. Judging by all the articles I have stumbled across lately it looks like I am not the only one who holds this sentiment.

Book Review: Three Cups of Tea

2010-05-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

Before I started studying for my GMAT and dropped all extracurricular activities like reading, I had started Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The book had been recommended to me by a few different people, but I guess I just didn't know enough about it to read it sooner. I really wish I had heeded friend's recommendation sooner as this book was truly one of the best, most inspiring true stories I have ever read. Not only that, I found that as I read the book that the story takes place in a world that I have a particular interest in given the nature of my current work in the armed forces.

Below is an excerpt from the publisher on what the book is all about:
In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time — Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world — one school at a time.

When I searched for reviews on the book they were overwhelmingly positive. I thought of how I would review this book beyond the standard "it's good, read it," and I came up with a simple review that I think speaks volume about the power of this book. When I began the book I thought it would be great for other military members to get some insight into what else the region is all about outside of our current conflict in the area. However, by the time I finished I felt much more strongly than that. I think this book should be a mandatory read for every politician in our nation. I think it should be a predeployment requirement for each sailor, soldier, and airman that heads to the theater. And more importantly, I think it should be read in schools to children. I learned more about Islam and the countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan than I did in all my time in the military. The book taught me more about the real issues in that area of the world than any news article I have ever read. I am kind of ashamed to admit that, but it is what it is. Surely that is partially my fault. Part it is likely just the nature of what actually makes it into our short attention spans as Americans. I imagine that many others would feel the same way I did as I read the book, and a little understanding could take us a long way in resolving or at least understanding the conflict we find ourselves in. My enjoyment of the book had me taking a plethora of notes and quotes that I have shared below. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

Here are some notes and quotes I took from this fine piece of literature:

Introduction:
- General Bhangoo cites Mortenson as the most remarkable person he has ever met. He served as Musharraf's pilot and has met many world leaders

Failure:
- When it is dark enough you can see the stars
- Stuck and stranded in the mountains freezing, "Sleep in this cold seemed out of the question, so Mortenson lay beneath the stars salting the sky and decided to examine the nature of his failure.
- He made piece with his failure to honor his deceased sister Christa. It was his body that had failed, not his spirit and every body has its limits. He for the first time in his life had found the absolute limit of his.

The Wrong Side of the River:
- "All summer I'd looked at these mountains as goals, totally focused on the biggest one, K2. I'd thought about their elevation and the technical challenges they presented to me as a climber. But that morning for the first time, I simply saw them. It was overwhelming." - Greg Mortenson. A great symbolism for life itself. Sometimes we must sit back and take it in.

Progress and Perfection:
- "Can you imagine a fourth grade class in America, alone, without a teacher, sitting there quietly and working on their lessons? I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them, that reminded me of Christa. I knew I had to do something." - Greg Mortenson
-Standing next to Haji Ali, on the ledge overlooking the valley, with such a crystalline view of the mountains he'd come halfway around the world to measure himself against, climbing K2 to place a necklace on its summit suddenly felt beside the point. There was a much more meaningful gesture he could make in honor of his sister's memory. He put his hands on Haji Ali's shoulders, as the old man had done to him dozens of times since they'd shared their first cup of tea. "I'm going to build you a school," he said, not yet realizing that with those words, the path of his life had just detoured down another trail, a route far more serpentine and arduous than the wrong turns he'd taken since retreating from K2. "I will build a school," Mortenson said. "I promise."

Self Storage:
-"Greatness is always built on this foundation: the ability to appear, speak and act, as the most common man."
- The older I get the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise.
- His father built a hospital in Tanzania focused on giving Tanzanians opportunity. The other expats were not happy when he said in 10 years I see all the department heads as Tanzanians.
- Watching him up there I felt so proud that this big barrel chested man was my father. He taught me, he taught all of us, that if you believe in yourself you can accomplish anything.
- After that the family moved to America in St. Paul.
- Greg signed up for the army his senior year since they didn't have much money.
- His father passed, then later his sister.

500 Letters One Check:
- He went right to the top writing letters to Oprah and the networks asking for money. Great lesson in going for it.
- He lived in his car and showered at the gym to save money for the school.
- Spoke to kids
- "But the kids got it right away. When they saw the pictures they couldn't believe that there was a place where children sat outside in the cold weather and tried to hold classes without teachers. They decided to do something about it.

Rawalpindi's Rooftops at Dusk:
- The quest for good can begin with a stubborn persistence to do what you say you are going to do.
- Take the first step and just keep walking

Hard Way Home:
- Not for the first time Mortenson wondered if Pakistan wasn't more of an idea than a country.
- Completed his treacherous journey and felt he had already won. I think when you set out to do something meaningful it often doesn't matter how far you get, because you got somewhere.

Beaten by the Braldu:
- Mortenson is an embodiment of the importance of human relationships. I don't think he could have succeeded had he not earned the respect of others he needed to help him.
- Mortenson felt a note of regret toward Akhmadu. He only wanted the children of his village to have the school that the government of Pakistan had failed to provide. But Mortenson's anger at Janjungpa and Changazi, at their scheming and dishonesty, spilled over the gratitude he felt for Akhmalu's months of uncomplaining service at K2 base camp until it became the same disheartening dun color as the surface of this ugliest of rivers.
- Perhaps he had been too harsh with these people: The economic disparity between them was just too great. Could it be that even a partially employed American who lived out of a storage locker could seem like little more than a flashing neon dollar sign to people in the poorest region of one of the world's poorest countries?
- When you reach out it can be overwhelming because you can't help everyone.

The People Have Spoken:
- He loses his girlfriend and his job
- "Pull yourself together Greg. Of course you have hit a few speed bumps.But what you are trying to do is much more difficult than climbing K2."
- Lou Reichardt knew something about suffering for and reaching difficult goals. His acknowledgement of how tough a path Mortenson was trying to walk made Mortenson feel that he hadn't failed. He just hadn't completed the climb. Yet.

Building Bridges:
- Rich societies can learn from the ancient societies about sustainment page 112
- "He operated as one of them, and I wondered how in the hell an American had managed that"
- Greg was humble and dodged credit. He did all the symbolic things to empower the Balti

Six Days:
-"I don't know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything,I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Mt. Everest. But my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. That has given me more satisfaction that a footprint on a mountain" - Sir Edmund Hillary

Haji Ali's Lesson:
- "It may seem absurd to believe that a "primitive" culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned." Helena Norberg-Hodge
- Watching this scene straight out of the Bible stories I'd learned in Sunday school I thought how much the different faiths had in common, how you could trace so many of their traditions back to the same root." - Greg Mortenson
- He stumbled his way into his life's work
- "That day Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life. We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty minute power lunches and two minute football drills. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them." - Mortenson
-"It was one of the most humbling things I have ever seen. Haji Ali had just handed over half the wealth of the village to that crook, but he was smiling like he'd just won a lottery," Mortenson said. "Don't be sad. Long after all those rams are dead and eaten this school will still stand. Haji Mehdi has food today. Now our children have education forever." - Hali Aji

A Smile Should Be More Than A Memory:
- The Wazir are not loyal to Afghanistan or Pakistan and have fiercely resisted worlds great powers throughout history
- Even the Taliban realized the importance of schools and spared Mortenson after eight days of captivity

Equilibrium:
- Hoerni's dying wish was to see the Korphe school
- Greg won people over by adapting and immersing himself in their way of life
- Greg removed a sick woman's placenta "For a Balti to let a foreign man, an infidel, have that kind of intimate contact with your wife took an incredible leap of faith. I felt humbled by how much they'd come to trust me,"
- Greg kept his word and delivered the picture to Hoerni
- "C'est moi, Jean. I built a school in the Karakoram Himalaya," he boasted. "What have you done for the last fifty years."
- "Jean Hoerni had the foresight to lead us to the twenty first century with cutting edge technology, but he also had the rare vision to look behind and reach out to people living as they have for centuries."

Mortenson in Motion:
- "We all sat there laughing and sipping tea peacefully. An infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. And I thought if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. The British policy was 'divide and conquer' but I say 'unite and conquer.'"
- A boy is sent by his father to go to school and he is scared and confused but his father knows it is the right thing to do. People were inspired and gave him money to contribute to his education. Similar to military service in US.
- Greg gets it. He is likely doing as much to combat extremism as anyone...through education and opportunities
- "Once you educate the boys they tend to leave and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls."

Cherry Trees in the Sand:
- Good political tidbits. The Mujahadeen liked Bill Clinton for saving Muslims in Bosnia. Swedes are a peaceful country but they sell many arms.
- "I wish Westerners who misunderstand Muslims could have seen Syed Abbas in action that day. They would see that most people who practice the true teachings of Islam, even conservative mullahs like Syed, believe in peace and justice, not in terror. Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority."
- "I have heard some people say Americans are bad. But we love Americans. They are the most kind people for us. They are the only ones who cared to help us." Fatima Batool
- "What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean, but the ocean would be less because of that missing drop." Greg Mortenson
- The Oregonian was the first to tell his tale
- Terrorist impact. "A politically volatile area, rural Pakistan is a breeding ground for terrorists who share anti-American sentiment. Illiterate young boys often wind up in terrorist camps. When we increase literacy we substantially reduce tensions."
- The wealthy lured him out to various events with promises of donations but he often returned empty handed
- "They were following the same philosophy as I was. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's idea that you can change a culture by giving its girls the tools to grow up educated so they can help themselves. It was amazing to see the idea in action, working so well after only a generation, and it fired me up to fight for girls' education in Pakistan."
- "I don't care where the money comes from. It's all washed clean in the service of God." - Mother Teresa
- The burden of success came in the form of a long line of people wanting something from him
- "In times of war, you often hear leaders--Christian, Jewish, and Muslim--saying 'God is on our side.' But that isn't true. In war, God is on the side of the refugees, widows, and orphans."

A Village Called New York:
- Wahhabism is the Saudi conservative fundamentalist offshoot of Sunni Islam
- Oil money is smuggled into Pakistan's poorest regions and used to build mosques and schools for "Islamic Education" in other words to promote extremism.
- For Pakistanis it is simple economics. Free room and board and an education at Madrassa centers
- "Neither the teachers nor the students had any formal background in maths, science, history, or geography." The madrassa students were "the rootless and restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their beliefs some meaning."
- "The work Mortenson is doing building schools is giving thousands of students what they need most--a balanced education and the tools to pull themselves out of poverty. But we need many more like them. His schools are just a drop in the bucket when you look at the scale of the problem in Pakistan. Essentially, the state is failing its students on a massive scale and making them far too easy for extremists who run many of the madrassas to recruit."
- Al Qaeda assassinated the Lion of Panjshir Ahmed Shah Massoud before Sept 11 to destroy one man capable of uniting Northern Afghanistan around the American military
- Greg was right down the road from Osama on 9-11
- "It is by fate that Allah the Almighty has brought us together in this hour. Today is a day that you children will remember forever and tell your children and grandchildren. Today from the darkness of illiteracy, the light of education shines bright. We share in the sorrow as people weep and suffer in America today as we inaugurate this school. Those who have committed this evil act against the innocent, women and children, to create thousands of widows and orphans do not do so in the name of Islam. By the grace of Allah the Almighty may justice be served upon them. For this tragedy I humbly ask Mr. George and Dr. Greg Sahib for their forgiveness. All of you my brethren: Protect and embrace these two American brothers in our midst. Let no harm come to them. Share all you have to make their mission successful. These two Christian men have come halfway around the world to show our Muslim children the light of education. Why have we not been able to bring education to our children on our own? Fathers and parents, I implore you to dedicate your full effort and commitment to see that all your children are educated. Otherwise, they will merely graze like sheep in the field, at the mercy of nature and the world changing so terrifyingly around us. I request America to look into our hearts and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education. But today, another candle of knowledge has been lit. In the name of Allah the Almighty, may it light our way out of the darkness we find ourselves in." - Syed Abbas

Tea With the Taliban:
- After 9-11 the US media was just pumping stories out without checking facts etc. Offered Greg bribes to get into Afghanistan
- "I tried to talk about root causes of the conflict--the lack of education in Pakistan, and the rise of the Wahhabi madrassas and how that led to problems like terrorism. But that stuff hardly ever made it to print. They only wanted sound bites about top Taliban leaders so they could turn them into villains in the run up to war,"
- "Perhaps we should turn in Bin Laden to save Afghanistan. Mullah Omar thinks there is still time to talk our way out of war. Make no mistake, we will fight to the finish if we are attacked." - Mullah Zaeef
- Claims Mullah Omar called Bush for talks but he never called
- Mortenson recognized that the majority of Afghanistan were victims of 9-11 as well. We lumped all Muslims as terrorist.
- "When Greg wins the Nobel Peace Prize I hope the judges in Oslo point to that day. This guy Greg quietly doggedly heading back into a war zone to do battle with the real causes of terror is every bit as heroic as those firemen running up the stairs of the burning towers while everyone else was frantically trying to get out."
- The Taliban used commercial flights and satellite phones to call in US positions
- Greg got death threats and hatemail for preaching not to lump all of Islam with terrorists

Rumsfeld's Shoes:
- No one tracked Afghanistan's civilian casualties
- "I am old enough to remember this nonsense from World War II, when we turned on all the Japanese and interned them without good cause. These horrible hate letters are a mandate for you to get out and tell Americans what you know about Muslims. You represent the goodness and courage that America is all about. Get out, don't be afraid, and spread your message for peace. Make this your finest hour." - Patsy Collins in a letter to Greg
- Nov 13 2001 Kabul filled with music which the Taliban had banned as the Taliban fled the city. Girls came out of hiding to go to school.
- No border security from Afghanistan to Pakistan
- He told me that less than a quarter of the aid money president Bush had promised his country had actually arrived in Afghanistan. And of those insufficient funds, he said $680 million had been redirected to build runways and bulk up supply depots in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar for the invasion of Iraq everyone had expected would soon begin.
- "I meet so many people day in and day out who say theyre trying to do good and help people. But Greg is the real thing. He's walking the walk. And I'm his biggest fan. The sacrifices that he and his family have made are staggering. He represents the best of America. I just wanted to do what I could to see that his humanity had a chance to rub off on as many people as possible." - Rep. Mary Bono
- "I don't do what I am doing to fight terror. I do it because I care about kids. Fighting terror is maybe seventh or eighth on my list of priorities. But working over there I have learned a few things. Ive learned that terror doesnt happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simple decide to hate us. It happens because cchildren arent being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death."
- "They walked quickly most of them clutching laptops under their arms speeding towards their next task like missiles, like there wasnt time to look at me. And I remember thinking I was in the Army once, but this didnt have anything to do with the military I knew. This was a laptop Army." - Greg on the Pentagon
- "The worst thing we can do is what we're doing--ignoring the victims. To call them 'collateral damage' and not even try to count the numbers of the dead. Because to ignore them is to deny they ever existed, and there is no greater insult in the islamic world. For that we will never be forgiven."
- "Im no military expert and these figures might not be exactly right. But as best as I can tell, we've launched 114 tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands over with a balanced nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which one do you think will make us more secure."
- Greg was offered money to build schools from the US military
- "I realized my credibility i that part of the world depended on me not being associated with the American government, especially its military."
- Greg's integrity is pretty incredible turning down millions from the US government
- I cant believe how many people in DC he got to meet and how involved he was in the history of our country yet we have never heard of him until his book. I dont know if that says more about the power of books or the state of our media.

The Enemy is Ignorance:
- A girl plops down in front of Greg in a tribal council and asks for money now for medical tuition. She was educated in CAI schools and embodies all that Greg had hoped the girls would learn.
- "If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else then we will be no safer than we were before 9-11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs."
- Story finally published in Parade magazine. Overwhelmed with letters Greg said he only got one negative one. Very diverse support and lots of vets
- "People like me are America's best friends in the region. Im a moderate muslim and educated man. But watching this even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer? Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion muslims against America for the next 200 years." General Bashir Baz
- "Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America Osama is in every home. As a military man I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case thats not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever." - General Baz
- Jahan the girl graduates and now wants to be a hospital exec
- "And now that I am already in Skardu I feel that anything is possible. I dont want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive and look over all the health problems of all the women in Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area. I want to be a superlady." She said daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn't.
Mortenson didnt laugh at all. Instead he beamed at the bold granddaughter of Hali Aji and imagined the contented look that would have been on the old nurmadhar's face if he had lived long enough to see this day, to see the seed they planted together bear such splendid fruit. 580 letters, twelve rams, and tens years of work was a small price to pay, Mortenson thought, for such a moment.

Stones Into Schools:
- Opium harvest spiked in 2003 from nonexistant to almost 4000 tons which was 2/3 of the worlds raw material for heroin. The funds were funneled back into the land to equip and recruit militias which made Karzais governement increasingly irrelevant.
- "We fought with Americans, here in these mountains, against the Russians. An though we heard many promises, they never returned to help us when the dying was done." Keep your promises!
- New fork in the road for Greg.

A Taste Of Home

2010-05-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

So I have been toying around with a Flip Video ever since I left on my deployment. The thing is great for shooting simple short videos which is exactly what I have been using it for. I think it will be a great way to let all my family and friends know what I am doing while I am away. I have been having a hard time describing what it is like to my wife, family and friends because it is so difficult to describe something so different from what any of them have experienced. It is like trying to describe a color. How do you tell someone what red looks like? Maybe I am just not as descriptive in speaking as I am while writing but regardless I need to get better at ensuring that my important human connections feel connected to my daily life while I am away, if for nothing other than for my wife's sanity.

I must say it is a pretty awkward feeling when you are by yourself talking to a camera so my hat goes off to all the video bloggers out there. I plan on setting up a YouTube page and getting it organized so that people who care can get a little taste of what my experiences are like over here in Iraq. The one thing that I have noticed in the few videos I have shot is how different things can come across in video versus just writing about them. You only get one shot to say how you feel on camera so it is a bit different than editing a blog post and it definitely feels a bit more invasive and personal. I guess it is something I will just have to get comfortable with. Well here is a short clip and my inaugural video blog post. Stay tuned for more and for an organized YouTube page with more clips.

Conscious Pattern Recognition

2010-05-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Pattern recognition is not a new and groundbreaking topic by any means. I myself can recall numerous recent experiences where I have recognized the importance of piecing together life's recurring patterns in different contexts. The successful economist, writer, and muser extraordinaire Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book on our mind's unique ability to process unfathomable amounts of data through subconscious pattern recognition. He describes this subconscious ability in the book Blink as the human equivalent of instincts. These instincts are the subconscious mind's recognition, collection, and organization of patterns. The mind then sends the conscious mind a message so to speak at very rapid speeds. This ability is definitely important, but what about conscious pattern recognition? The kind of pattern recognition that can be honed through conscious recognition and effort.

It wasn't until today about 90% through a grueling workout provided by my lovely personal trainer wife that I had the epiphany of the extreme importance of conscious pattern recognition. As I said earlier, I have always had little moments of clarity where I recognize parallels that arise in different life contexts. However it wasn't until today that it fell into place for me as I realized how much better my wife's workouts are than mine. I started to think of how far ahead she is with her ability to create dynamic workouts that truly push me through an entire full body workout.

What do workouts have to do with pattern recognition? Well nothing really. But the disparity between what I can create and what she can create has a lot to do with pattern recognition. Certainly her talent isn't purely superior knowledge. I enjoy working out, am fairly knowledgeable on the topic, and have the benefit of osmosis as I live with her. So as I was walking back from my work out I began wondering whether her talent is a gift or whether it was honed from pure passion and a superior ability to recognize patterns within that facet of life.

I heard a phrase on The Biggest Loser a while back. Jillian Michaels, who is a beauty by the way, told the contestants one day that she and Bob are the best in the world at what they do. She went on to say that no one can make contestants lose weight like they do. I believe her. I wonder what her conscious pattern recognition ability is like when it comes to creating workouts. Does her mind visually piece together a map of the body and the areas of focus for each workout. Does her mind flawlessly fashion together workout algorithms to fine tune the body in master fashion? Does she use pattern recognition of similar problems amongst contestants past and present to devise her transformation strategy?

I think that conscious pattern recognition ability is one of the key components to success in almost all things. To this day I can step on the ice and recognize patterns in the game that many other people who didn't play at as high a level cannot. Are these people way less talented than me? Most aren't and many have more natural talent than I do. However, when it came to hockey I had an ability to recognize recurring themes in the game that was built through hard work and years of experience. Wayne Gretzky often talked of his ability to see two or three plays ahead of the game, an almost ESP like ability to anticipate. I would venture to say that his pattern recognition within the game of hockey is greater than perhaps anyone who has ever lived.

Many people who are successful in one area tend to be successful in other areas. This isn't due to the fact that they are superior human beings. They achieve consistent success because they possess a superior ability to recognize patterns which allows them to posture themselves for success in a wide variety of areas. Can you apply this concept to other facets of your life? I am sure you can. Think of your office environment. Do you see the same mistakes being made day in and day out? Do you see the same communication problems manifest in different organizations and sectors? Do you see similar attributes in the successful people? The unsuccessful ones? How can you consciously attempt to recognize patterns to continually adapt to each and every situation thereby setting yourself to achieve your goals? Kind of a new agey concept but a very transcendent and helpful one nonetheless.

A Combat Landing - Welcome To Your New World

2010-05-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

I reached up weakly, my arm shaking from stress, starvation, and a lack of sleep to wipe my sweat soaked brow. I gazed down at my drenched palm and eventually looked past it through the netting of my jump seat down to my dusty backpack. Suddenly the weathered C-130 I was crammed into with forty other people from various services and agencies simultaneously took a hard banking turn and started an intense dive. As we spiraled downward I knew we were making a combat landing into Baghdad and that this was fairly routine. But I couldn't help but feel a bit uneasy as the iron lung that held my life within began to groan and creak like a dying steel mammoth taking its last agonizing steps on a journey too far. I looked around the steamy innards of the beast and was struck by the intense silence of everyone on board. The faces of my comrades reassured me that my emotional duress was shared. Then suddenly I heard a loud crash. I felt my chinstrap clinging intently to the Kevlar helmet resting on my head, and I choked mildly as my flack vest rose with the impact. We had landed safely......I was in Iraq.

Not only did my over dramatic description above actually happen in the last week, but it also serves as a metaphor to my entire deployment experience since landing in Baghdad, Iraq. A combat landing is a short, intense and overwhelmingly new experience. As has been my five days or so in Iraq. There are a few things that have really hit me in my first week over here.

This isn't your Grandpa's war story - One of the most striking contradictions to my deployment expectations was what a modern base looks and functions like. I was expecting more of a tent city feel like in the movies. GI's walking around in greasy t-shirts playing cards and hanging out. Not here. There are government and contractor vehicles everywhere. There are contractors from around the world living and functioning alongside the various countries various service members. There are a lot of the things we have in the States, but everything in this "world" functions in a little different manner. It is really hard to describe, but the best I can do is say that nothing is really intuitive when you are plopped down into your new world. Which leads nicely into my next observation.

We take a lot for granted - As I said, nothing is intuitive over here if you have never deployed. I felt like and still feel a bit like a little kid. I went from being fairly self reliant to totally dependent almost overnight. It is a very fragile and frustrating feeling. I literally can never recall ever being so dependent because I was probably too young to remember. My coworkers and friends literally had to teach me how to eat, sleep, shower and more. It was during my initial transitory phase that I started to realize how much I take for granted in American society. Reliable, clean running water is a start. Housing that has most of my health and hygiene needs at my disposal is another. Mostly I took for granted the incredible amount of choice I had back home. Especially the choice of what to do with my time. Here most time is spent on basic health and work, and everything is laid out for the military guys. I can't imagine actually being an Iraqi national and having to do whatever it takes to make a better life for myself and my family. Obviously what choices you have with your time are much more limited. It almost makes me feel a bit guilty for the way I have viewed other countries in the past. As if their actions and interests should always be taken through an American filter. But that is not the case. Each nation has a unique past and a unique set of values that shape and define their existence. To think that others think the way we do is not only false but dangerously naive.

Good people can always get you though - Like most other tough times in my life I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by good people. When you surround yourself with good people life never really gets too shitty. And when it does at least you have some solid people to help get you through it. My deployment so far has been no exception and I have a good group of people that I can laugh with, complain with, talk with, work out with, and pass the time with until that lovely day that I get to go back home to my wife and the life we have built together.

I would love to hear any other observations or lessons from other deployers and how your experience has been different than mine thus far.

Socialites and Solitude

2010-05-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

It has been a few weeks since my last entry and when I look back to the last time I posted it seems like months have passed. During those few weeks I have done a million things to get ready to deploy and experienced a million different emotions as well. Now I am sitting in Baltimore, Maryland for a few days before I ship out to Baghdad.

I must admit that it feels a little weird to actually relax and I am not sure I am really relaxing yet. However, it is the first time in probably three weeks that I have not had too much to do in too little time. I had a week of insanity to get out the door and once I got to my pre-deployment training in San Antonio I was so immersed in that environment that it feels like forever since I just sat down with nothing to do. It also struck me that this is the first time in a very long time that I have actually had an extended period of time to myself. I spend every second I can with my wife and we love spending time with family and friends. I am a social person and love being around other people so that is generally what I spend my time doing.

I knew that I felt a little strange being out here in Baltimore and I knew that it was something beyond the mixed feelings of heading out on a deployment. I finally placed it that I am just not used to having this much time in solitude. I usually settle for my car rides to and from work, an hour or so playing guitar, reading or writing, and workouts to get my fix of alone time but being alone for days on end has definitely changed my perspective and allowed me to do a bit of thinking. Here are a few random musings I have come up with in my last couple days.

Why do we drink - I heard a theory that part of man's affinity with drinking alcohol is that we get sick of people and that we spend more time with ourselves than anyone else so throwing a few back is our escape from ourselves. I don't know how valid that theory is or even how much I agree with it, but I do take part with the assumption that we truly spend a lot of time with ourselves. Sure we are engulfed in our day to day consciousness, but how often do we sit back and really try and get to know ourselves? I know that is a big part of the reason I started BadskiBlog was to do some introspection on a more regular basis. However, there is definitely something to be said for the forcing function that is solitude on looking within. Given my nature, I can't really see myself seeking out days on end for introspection. However, I think that I will acknowledge their importance to a healthy understanding of one's self and I certainly will make the most of situations like the one I am in now that arise in the future.

External observations - I have noticed the last day or so how much more aware I am of the situations around me. I am the kind of person that really gets engulfed by those I spend time with. Most times when I meet people I instantly forget their name because most times I am not even listening to it. I am too busy taking in their expressions, the sound of their voice, their energy, etc. trying to rapidly form my interpretation of who they are and what they are about. I have always been that way. It is no surprise that this not only causes me to be terrible with names, but also to be in a "bubble" where I am consumed only with those I am in close contact with. I think it often leads me to be oblivious to things outside that bubble. Being alone the last couple days I am shocked at how much I have been picking up around me. It is amazing how much you can learn about people and the way they interact by just being observant. Not weirdo spy style or anything, but just being present with the actions going on around you. So much of life revolves around successful human interactions and having a better understanding of them can only help you to create more successful interactions of your own . I would like to make it a point from this point forward to break outside my bubble so to speak and consciously take in the lessons around me.

Trust and interdependency - Not only has being away from my wife made me realize how much I depend on her, but it has also made me take note how much trust we place on people we do not know. It is truly amazing how interconnected humans truly are. Just taking my arrival in Baltimore as an example, I trust that the pilot will land me safely. I trust that the airport will transport a firearm and deliver it to me successfully. I trust that the cab driver will take me where I asked to go. I am sure some of the readers are not finding this topic too earth shattering but I think it is really crazy when you take a step back and realize how much we lean on people we do not have any personal connection with. I think that is part of the reason that Americans fear places like Iraq or Afghanistan so much. In those countries the trust amongst nameless contacts is no where near that of our nation's. Subconsciously we are aware of the absence of the inherent trust amongst strangers. Anyone who has travelled abroad can relate to the feeling they had when they were put in situation where that trust was questioned. I think that is part of the greatness and quality of life that we take for granted; the ability to rely on those we do not know to better the lives of everyone.

BadskiBlog Is Heading To The Sandbox

2010-04-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

I was notified this week that I have a short notice tasking to Iraq. My blog may be a little light on content for the next couple weeks as I go through training and transition to my new life for the next 6 months. I fully intend to blog while deployed. I am not sure how often I will be able to post but I will do my best. My blog will undoubtedly shift in parallel with my new surroundings and experiences so I suspect my content to be geared more towards topics like the military, the wars, our political environment, etc. However, seeing as it is my first deployment who knows what will happen with BadskiBlog from here. Stay tuned and please feel free to reach out to me at any time at truecore27@aol.com.

Learning To Be An Entrepreneur

2010-03-29T18:03:00.001-07:00

Seeing as I have all but abandoned BadskiBlog in pursuit of a better GMAT score the last month, I thought it was fitting to sneak in a blog post about MBA's. There is a steady debate within the business community on whether entrepreneurs are born or taught. My sense is that entrepreneurs are molded both by gifts at birth as well as their experiences and education. Fortune Magazine took a stab at this argument in a recent article in their small business blog by focusing less on the endless debate and more on the opportunities available to hone the entrepreneurial attributes you can control; your education.

Gregg Fairbrothers wasn't born to business. He grew up in an academic household. "I didn't know a debit from a credit," he admits. Fairbrothers studied earth sciences at Dartmouth in the '70s, got his master's at Rutgers, and eventually moved to Tulsa, where he joined Samson, a gas driller, and earned his chops at the right hand of the company's "hard-nosed founder." He picked up an MBA, but that was "just to get the toolkit," he says. "I learned my business on the job."

Today, as founding director of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, Fairbrothers teaches a wildly popular course on entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business.

The article lists a few interesting facts on teaching entrepreneurship and how it has really exploded in the past few decades.

Twenty years ago teaching people how to start their own businesses was a sideshow at B-schools, of scant interest to future consultants and Wall Streeters. Today entrepreneurship education is everywhere. More than two-thirds of U.S. colleges and universities -- well over 2,000, up from 200 in the 1970s -- are teaching it, and they offer it to all comers: social workers, farmers, and even musicians. The field is thriving, but have we figured out yet the best way to teach this stuff? If not, are we at least getting better at it? And can you even teach someone to be an entrepreneur?

Although Fairbrothers teaches entrepreneurship it seems as though he shares similar sentiments that I do, acknowledging that entrepreneurship is likely a combination of born attributes and learned skill. I have posted a few of his most enlightening comments below.

Fairbrothers has heard what critics say. To a point, he shares their doubts. He's not sure anybody has figured out yet how to define entrepreneurship, much less measure it.

According to a Kauffman Foundation study published early this year, the surge in entrepreneurial education during the past three decades has had "no appreciable impact on entrepreneurial activity in the United States." Even at Tuck, less than 2% of graduates immediately start their own businesses.

But maybe that's not the right way to look at it. Entrepreneurs are not defined by what they do, Fairbrothers argues, but by how they do it. He views entrepreneurship as a set of traits, identifiable and measurable, and dispersed along a classic bell curve. Here he sides with Howard Stevenson and David Gumpert, co-authors of a seminal study published 25 years ago in Harvard Business Review. Entrepreneurship is not "an all-or-none trait that some people or organizations possess and others don't," the authors wrote, but rather "a range of behavior."

"So the question is," says Fairbrothers, "can you take a point on that curve and move it? If 'entrepreneurial' is to the right, can you move it that way? I know I can move it that way. I've done it."