I came across this BBC arti­cle today and it strikes me as yet another indi­ca­tion of the prob­lems with school sys­tems in the west­ern world..   Here a kid finally takes inter­est in pol­i­tics and the state of a coun­try; he’s engaged, informed and holds an opin­ion about how the future of the UK should look…    The trou­ble? He’s 14, sev­eral years away from vot­ing age.   What makes me a bit crazy is that his teacher rat­ted him out rather than using the sit­u­a­tion as a pure learn­ing oppor­tu­nity and hav­ing the kid in ques­tion fess up prop­erly.  What’s the les­son we learned here?  In the ‘real world’ it’s okay to be a tattle-tale.

Right..

I say, good on ya Alfie. I’ll buy you a beer when you’re 18 and it won’t get you in any more trouble..

So the shiny new Apple iPad has been released.  Sorta.

This mes­sage appears at the tail end of a video trailer from Apple describ­ing the won­ders of their new prod­uct and in an rather anti­cli­mac­tic close sug­gests that FCC approval for the device isn’t quite in place yet.  As a cus­tomer (or poten­tial cus­tomer) this felt like a bit of a buzz kill, right after a drink­ing the big-gulp sized cup of Apple hype.  From a busi­ness per­spec­tive how­ever, it makes com­plete sense. I mean, really, is there any­one out there that believes they won’t get the approval?  Some­times it’s bet­ter to get the momen­tum started and worry about the fin­ish­ing details later.

By odd coin­ci­dence, as the announce­ment came through this morn­ing, I was watch­ing this video pre­sen­ta­tion by Seth Godin on the mer­its of ship­ping, get­ting your prod­uct to mar­ket, and fast.  His com­men­tary on pro­duc­tiv­ity revolves around hash­ing out details in the begin­ning of your prod­uct devel­op­ment and then reject­ing the impulses of what he calls “the lizard brain”, the lit­tle voice in our heads that resists suc­cess in the long term.

In essence, he’s describ­ing the con­cept fol­lowed by count­less suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies and entre­pre­neurs which is, ship, then bug fix. Per­fec­tion it seems, is a long lost con­cept.   As a com­pany this makes you more mar­ketable (not to men­tion sol­vent) but is it good for clients to receive an imper­fect prod­uct for their hard earned dol­lars?  Or do they even care?  What do you think?

Last fall, after a late frost ruined all of the fruit on two apple trees in my back yard, I made the deci­sion to leave it all as fod­der for the birds this win­ter.   Much to my cha­grin, the squir­rels are the only crea­tures that have been mak­ing use of the offer­ing and mostly that’s been hap­pen­ing over the last month or so.  We haven’t had a par­tic­u­larly hard win­ter, but I sus­pect that the more palat­able win­ter food has been con­sumed and now these lit­tle ver­min are hav­ing to settle..

I’ll be clear that these lit­tle crea­tures are ver­min, and a nui­sance, they’ve chewed through more than one impor­tant bit of the house, and make a habit of skit­ter­ing along the stucco out­side my bed­room at ungodly hours of the morn­ing. I yell at them, shake my fists, and even pound on the walls  on occa­sion, but I must admit it’s dif­fi­cult to NOT enjoy watch­ing them scam­per through the snow and scurry up the trees to pick fruit nearly the same size as their lit­tle carcasses.

I caught this lit­tle guy the other day camped out on a sunny win­dow sill and quite enjoy­ing his meal (until I came along that is..)

I still have no idea where the impulse came from, but I dug up a copy of Baz Luhurmann’s 1999 release Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sun­screen) this morn­ing.  As I lis­tened with a decade of addi­tional expe­ri­ence under my belt, I’ve real­ized how sim­ple wis­dom can be, and how we tend to ignore that of those who are fur­ther down the path then ourselves.

As I progress through Lead­er­ship Cal­gary, the focus shifts fre­quently back to build­ing wis­dom in to our ways of think­ing and being. At times the prospect (and in fact the process of get­ting there) seems immea­sur­ably daunt­ing.  After list­ing to this record­ing for the first time in ten years  though, I real­ize that wis­dom really can be sim­ple.. to those that posses it.  It’s the getting-there that’s difficult.

Baz Lehur­mann: Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Ladies and Gen­tle­men of the class of ’99, wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sun­screen would be
it. The long term ben­e­fits of sun­screen have been proved by
sci­en­tists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reli­able
than my own mean­der­ing experience…

I will dis­pense this advice now.

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I had an inter­est­ing encounter this after­noon when I met the Postie out in front of the house..  I intro­duced myself and as we chat­ted, he com­mented about some stock he’d pur­chased in a com­pany that I haven’t worked for in over a year.  For the first time I caught a glimpse of a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, a world where the only con­nec­tion to your client is through the outer mark­ings on an enve­lope.  When I real­ized this, I even felt a bit silly for offer­ing my first name.  I’m the only one who gets mail at this address after all, and why wouldn’t I be me?

When I worked at tech­ni­cal sup­port sev­eral years ago, I knew clients by their user­name alone (save a few regular-callers), and often I would recall a plethora of infor­ma­tion about the spe­cific con­fig­u­ra­tion of their com­puter, pre­vi­ous prob­lems and addi­tional email addresses with­out much thought.  Sev­eral of the reg­u­lar clients I could still list off by user­name, but any fur­ther details of their lives are for­ever lost in the Telco archives..

This really high­lights to me what a huge impact our envi­ron­ment can have on our ori­ent­ing sto­ries, our way of see­ing the world. I’m curi­ous now, has any­one else had this expe­ri­ence, or can you relate to the tech-support or postman’s side of the equation?