Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Innovating on the Edge of Big Waves

On Saturday, January 12, surfers from around the world converged on Maverick’s to challenge each other on the big waves that have made this a legendary surfing destination. The sixth Maverick’s Surf Contest had been announced only forty-eight hours earlier to ensure optimal wave conditions for the contestants. Surfers from as far away as Australia, Brazil and South Africa scrambled to make their way to this invitation only competition at Pillar Point, just a few miles away from San Francisco. It was magical to watch these athletes challenge twenty foot waves with an ease and grace that made it all seem so natural.

Beneath the surface, though, there is a different story here, one that contains important lessons for business executives. While all attention was on the athletes riding their surfboards, the technology and techniques used to master big wave surfing have evolved over decades, driven by dedicated, perhaps even obsessed, groups of athletes and craftsmen. Executives can gain significant insight into the innovation process by looking in unexpected places like the big wave surfing arena.

Innovations in big wave surfing

Surfing has a long and distinguished history.  The activity had been pursued for centuries by the Hawaiians, where it was a central part of their daily life.  Surfing was pursued with great rituals and it served a key role in Hawaiian culture to strengthen the status of the king and nobility relative to commoners. The surfboards used by the king and nobility were made of fine woods,  and were long and very heavy, measuring up to 25 feet long and weighing up to 175 pounds. Surfing fell into disrepute and became virtually extinct in the 19th century under the pressure of newly arrived Western missionaries, who disapproved of the state of undress and mixing of sexes associated with surfing at the time.

Surfing slowly regained a following in the early part of the twentieth century but it was not until the early 1950’s that big wave surfing began to attract attention.  Ten foot single-finned surfboards with a balsa core and wrapped in a new material coming out of the aerospace industry – fiberglass resins - were introduced in the early 1950’s specifically to tackle big waves – at the time considered to be 10 to 20 foot waves. Along with new materials like Styrofoam and polyurethane foam, surfboard shapers were able to cut the weight of the surfboard in half while increasing the strength of the board. These advances made the sport accessible to a much broader group of younger enthusiasts.  Surfing enthusiasts in southern California developed a distinctive lifestyle and culture on the margin of 1950’s button-down culture.  Known disdainfully as “surf bums”, one of the early participants indicated that “surfing was not something you did, but something you became.”

In 1953, a group of these southern California surfers, including Greg Noll, inspired by newspaper photos of surfers tackling fifteen foot waves, boarded flights to Hawaii and made the trek out to Oahu’s Makaha Beach. There, the warm water and gently tapered waves proved to be a fertile ground for the next stage of big wave surfing. A couple of years earlier, a mainland transplant by the name of George Downing, one of the early pioneers of big wave surfing, had come up with the idea of adding a changeable stabilizing fin to his surfboard to provide greater control. Known as an “elephant gun”, later shortened to just “gun”, these boards helped surfers to tackle 15 foot waves with ease.

In 1957, Greg Noll, one of the California émigrés, headed to the North Shore of Oahu where famed Waimea Bay became the next test bed for athletes seeking to push the boundaries of big wave surfing. In the isolation of the North Shore, dedicated surfers spent 8 – 10 hours each day, every day, challenging themselves and each other on the big waves of Waimea Bay. Using the skills and techniques mastered there, Noll succeeded in riding a 35 foot wave at Makaha in 1969, the largest wave ridden until that time, staying that way for another 20 years. In his autobiography, Noll described “looking over the . . . edge at the big, black pit. . . . I didn’t think so at the time, but in retrospect I realize it was probably bordering on the edge.”  Noll had a magnetic personality and was instrumental in generating interest and publicity in big wave surfing, helping to build a very large surfboard business - Greg Noll Surfboards was the largest surfboard maker at the time.

It wasn’t until the early 1990’s that another surfing pioneer, Laird Hamilton, working with a couple of other surfing greats, came up with the innovations that would finally allow big wave surfers to tackle waves significantly greater than 30 feet.  Hamilton and his team looked for inspiration to wind surfing where sails helped windsurfers to achieve the speeds required to tackle really big waves and flat water freeboarding where boats were used to tow surfers much like water skiers. From these arenas, Hamilton and his team latched on to the idea of towing surfers into big waves with inflatable Zodiacs and then jet skis. Harnessing a sling shot effect made it possible for surfers to gain the speed required to catch and ride larger and larger waves.

Tow-in surfing, as it became known, was further helped by insights from snowboarding.  Working with leading surfboard shapers, Hamilton and his team challenged the conventional wisdom that longer boards were required to surf big waves and instead introduced much shorter boards with straps for the feet to provide much greater control in coping with the speed and turbulence of really big waves.

Pursuing these new practices and design ideas, Hamilton and the others working with him recognized that challenging larger and larger waves required a team effort.  Honing their craft at Jaws, a break off Maui, these surfing teams by the end of the decade were regularly riding 50 foot waves with ease.

While many of the surfboard design breakthroughs and towing techniques were first developed on the relatively remote north shore of Oahu, groups of dedicated surfers around the world at big wave sites like Maverick’s in California and similar breaks in places like Western Australia and South Africa worked closely with each other locally to perfect the practices required to fully exploit the potential of these new technologies and designs. Practicing in isolation, these surfers would regularly convene to test their capabilities and learn from each other in big wave competitions in places like Maverick’s, Waimea, Todos Santos and Pico Alto.

Bottom line for business executives

So, what can business executives learn from the experiences of these intrepid surfers?  First, if you want to push your performance levels, find the relevant edge.  In the case of big wave surfers, there has been an ever-expanding search for the breaks that would produce bigger and rougher waves to test new board designs and surfing practices.  Major breakthroughs in performance did not occur in the milder surf of Malibu, but in the pounding surf of Waimea and Jaws or the notorious Teahupoo break of Tahiti.

Following the lead of big wave surfers, business executives need to find relevant edges that will test and push their current performance.  For example, companies making diesel engines and power generators should be actively engaged in finding ways to more effectively serve lower income customers in remote rural areas of emerging economies. These demanding customers could prompt significant innovation in both product design and distribution processes in an effort to deliver greater value at lower cost. The innovations resulting from these efforts on the edge could lead to significant improvements in their product lines more broadly.

Second, attract motivated groups of people to these edges to work together around challenging performance issues.  There are great stories about Jeff Clark who surfed Maverick’s solo for fifteen years before the “break” was discovered by the broader surf community, but the real advances in surfing technology and practices occurred at the breaks where surfers gathered and formed deep relationships over extended periods of time.  They learned rapidly from each other and pushed each other to go to the next level.

Large companies have become very adept at establishing remote outposts in places like Beijing, Hyderabad, Haifa and St. Petersburg to attract local talent and push challenging research and development projects. Often, though, these outposts either become disconnected from their parent companies or fail to establish deep linkages with other leading edge participants in the local area.  The key challenge is to connect these company-owned facilities more effectively with their local environments as well as with each other through challenging and sustained innovation initiatives that build long-term trust based relationships.

Performance improvement generally comes first in the form of tacit knowledge that is difficult to express and communicate more broadly. You literally have to be there to gain access to this tacit knowledge.  Big wave surfers who watched Laird Hamilton tackle the Teahupoo break in Tahiti for the first time in 2000 noticed that he put his right hand into the wave on a left breaking killer wave, something unheard of in surfing. It was an instinctive move on Hamilton’s part; he had never done it before and he was not even aware of doing it, but it was enormously effective in coping with the distinctive power of these waves. Those who were there to observe this and who had deep understanding of the practice of big wave surfing realized immediately that a powerful new practice was being developed.

Third, recognize that the people who are likely to be attracted to the edge are big risk-takers. Greg Ambrose, a surfer, observed that "When surfing Waimea it is essential to have the proper crazed attitude that implies a certain reckless disregard for personal safety. If you paddle out thinking you are going to get hurt, you will. If you think you can't make the drop, you won't. If you begin to wonder what in the world you're doing out among those menacing waves, it's time to be thankful you're still alive and head for the beach."

This is a key reason why the edge becomes such a fertile ground for innovation.  It attracts people who are not afraid to take risks and to learn from their experiences. They have a different disposition, relentlessly seeking out new challenges. Executives need to be thoughtful about how to attract these people, provide them with environments to support risk-taking and reward them for both successes and failures.

The natural response is to create highly segmented organizations – one part of the company focuses on the core business while separate organizational units focus on highly innovative (and more risky) business initiatives.   The challenge with this approach is to bring the edge back into the core.  The innovations spawned in the edge organizations are often critical to the continued success of the core business, yet the different cultures, mindsets and skill sets create significant barriers to learning.  Executives need to balance organizational focus with aggressive performance challenges and incentive structures that reward collaboration across these organizational units.

Fourth, recognize that the edge fosters not just risk-taking, but very different cultures that are also “edgy”.  The advances in big wave surfing did not come from the casual surfers, but those who developed an entire lifestyle and culture, fostered by intense and even obsessive concentration on pushing the envelope.  The early big wave surfers in Waimea were so obsessed they lived in close quarters right on the beach and relied on the sea and the occasional stolen chicken or pineapple for food. Dismissed as “surf bums” by mainstream society, they developed their own distinctive identity.  Executives need to find ways to protect and honor these edgy cultures, whether it is the tattooed web designers or the next generation of employees who learned how to innovate as members of guilds in World of Warcraft.

Fifth, find ways to appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines and even more remote areas of activity.  The aerospace industry could not be further removed from surfing, yet early advances in surfing technology came from this industry, because some of the employees in this industry were also avid surfers.  Some of Laird Hamilton’s greatest insights came from his experiences as an expert windsurfer and his colleagues’ experiences with snowboarding. By attracting diverse backgrounds and experiences to the edge, executives can foster creative breakthroughs.

Sixth, bring users and developers of technology closely together at the edge.  It is no accident that the most innovative surfers also tended to be expert shapers of surfboards. These folks not only designed surfboards but shaped the materials into the finished product and then took them out to life-threatening breaks to test them and refine them. They were relentless tinkerers, integrating experience, intuition and craft making skills to come up with creative new boards. Downing and Noll were both proficient shapers, driven by their experiences in using their own surfboards, and Laird Hamilton is the adopted son of one of the most renowned surfboard shapers, Billy Hamilton.  Eric Von Hippel has written extensively about this phenomenon in other extreme sports arenas and the same pattern plays out here – technology and product innovations critically depend upon deep and extended interaction with leading edge users.

Technology and practice are intimately linked.  Very little performance improvement comes directly out of the technology itself.  It is only when seasoned practitioners engage with the technology, especially in close-knit communities, and evolve their practices to better use the technology that the real performance breakthroughs occur. One of the big wave surfers watching Laird Hamilton first getting towed into a big wave said the wave was no bigger than the waves that had been paddled before, but the technique was clearly different. It set the stage for a new “S-curve” of performance improvement. Evolving practices in turn generate insight to the product designers for future waves of design innovation.

Finally, executives could profit from understanding the loose practice network that evolved around big wave surfing.  Key individuals like Greg Noll, Laird Hamilton and Jeff Clark have played pivotal roles in shaping and growing this network.  They certainly have not applied the traditional management techniques that most executives use, but they have been very effective in attracting world-class talent, focusing that talent on challenging performance goals and helping to disseminate the learning that came from these efforts. Complex and shifting relationships among athletes, commercial enterprises and competitions shaped the advances we have seen in big wave surfing. These new management techniques, or perhaps more accurately, orchestration techniques will increasingly determine who creates value and who destroys value when seeking to innovate on the edge.

(Note: This is a longer version of a column that John Seely Brown and I have written for Business Week. JSB and I have written a working paper on Creation Nets that focuses more explicitly on the management techniques required to deliver business value from the kind of collaboration described above. Also, for other examples of innovation on the edge of other extreme sports, check out Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation and The Sources of Innovation). Finally, for those really energized about this brief description of the history of big wave surfing, check out the fantastic documentary Riding Giants or just go ahead and buy  Riding Giants (Special Edition) at Amazon.  There's a clip from the documentary at Youtube that highlights the tacit knowledge example of Laird Hamilton surfing in Tahiti (hat tip to Ethan Eismann.  For those who want to learn even more about the history of surfing, check out Matt Warshaw's excellent The Encyclopedia of Surfing.)

Fractal Spikes and Global Competition

In my last blog posting, I mentioned the increasing value of place.  At a time when information technology is supposed to make location irrelevant, we need to wrestle with the paradox that location is becoming more, rather than less, important. In fact, place is becoming an ever more critical dimension of competition in global markets. Executives who dismiss the value of place are likely to find themselves marginalized.

Microclusters

In this context, Steve Lohr wrote a fascinating article in the New York Times on December 20 entitled "Silicon Valley Shaped by Technology and Traffic" making the case that Silicon Valley actually consists of multiple “microclusters”.  Geographically, the microclusters array as follows:

While there are plenty of exceptions, it is generally true that hardware clusters – semiconductors, disk drives and network equipment, for example – are in the South Valley, around San Jose and Santa Clara. . . . . Moving farther north in the Valley typically means moving farther away from the guts of the machine and climbing up the tiers of computing – from chips and layers of business and consumer software and then into San Francisco, home to people with online advertising and digital design skills.

Lohr might have also mentioned emerging microclusters around biotech in South San Francisco and nanotech in the Menlo Park/Palo Alto area.

These microclusters are defined by skills, but they also generate cultural friction as well.  Lohr writes:

There is a certain visual identity to the clusters, and a hint of cultural tension among them. The clearest schism, perhaps, separates Valley dwellers from San Francisco residents.

The hard core in the Valley jokes that San Francisco, with its Internet advertising and design cluster, has a “high P.I.B. coefficient,” for People in Black.  The city’s companies also have more women than those in the Valley.  San Franciscans regard Valley engineers as denizens of a style-free suburban zone for whom being well-dressed means wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a company logo.

Marc Andreesen, co-founder of three Silicon Valley companies, sums up the culture clash best with this quote from the article:

“ . . . in general, the nerds with minimal social lives like me are well down in the Valley, and the cool kids with the trendy glasses and Prada shoes who like to go to parties are in San Francisco.  You can guess who has the leg up in building companies.”

Some companies like Google need to access talent from multiple microclusters, leading to solutions like Google's 32 shuttle buses that help ease the commute to its campus for some 1,000+ employees.  There is no word about the culture clashes that surface as the buses from San Francisco discharge their people in black on campus (perhaps they don camouflage before boarding the buses).

(For the record, I live in the mid-Peninsula area, close enough to drop in on the cool San Francisco parties, but far enough away to get some serious work done.)

Why Place Matters

Lohr's article provides compelling evidence that geographic proximity still matters, even down to the neighborhood level, even in the most technologically sophisticated talent pool in the US.  Why is this the case?

It is all about talent development.  No matter how talented any of us are these days, our talents must be continually and quickly refreshed and augmented if we are to thrive in this rapidly changing global economy.

The best way to refresh and augment talent is not to attend some training course.  In this fast-moving world, by the time knowledge has been expressed and packaged in a form that can be used in a training course, it is probably out of date. We all need to find ways to connect with people who are at the leading edge of relevant talent pools. 

The most valuable knowledge these people have is tacit knowledge – especially the knowledge that is so new that they have difficulty in articulating it, much less abstracting and codifying it. This is a key point for business strategy – when the pace of change accelerates, the balance of value between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge shifts profoundly. Strategies focused on developing and protecting explicit knowledge fall when confronted with effective strategies to tap into and leverage tacit knowledge.

This is exactly why talent spikes become so strategically important in times of rapid change.  They provide rich opportunities to connect with people at the leading edge of relevant talent pools and more effectively access the tacit knowledge that is so valuable. These connections can take many different forms.  It starts with the casual encounter at the soccer game as described by Steve Lohr in his article. It could be connections that are made possible by a rich infrastructure of specialized service providers, including financers, lawyers, marketing firms or even real estate firms.  One of the key roles of good venture capitalists is to serve as a talent hub, making introductions helpful to their entrepreneurs in accessing relevant talent.

These connections can be very helpful in terms of exposing someone to a new idea or story that sparks some creative insight.  For many, including myself, it is about the patterns that emerge from countless encounters and conversations.

But the true richness of talent spikes comes from the opportunity they provide to engage in real work with other people who are at the leading edge of their fields.  It is one thing to have a casual conversation at a party or even a business meeting.  It is a completely different thing to engage in a challenging work project where all the participants are pushing their skills to the limit and learning deeply from the experience and expertise of others.  It is here that tacit knowledge becomes the most visible and accessible. JSB and Paul Duguid did a masterful job of highlighting this role of talent spikes in their essays “Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics in Silicon Valley” and "Local Knowledge: Innovation in the Networked Age."

Talent spikes differ in terms of their ability to provide this opportunity.  Annalee Saxenian, in her historic work, Regional Advantage, captured the advantage of Silicon Valley relative to Route 128 outside Boston as a high tech talent spike precisely in these terms.  In the Route 128 corridor tech companies tended to operate as self-contained and relatively secretive entities with limited flows of employees across enterprise boundaries.  Silicon Valley companies in contrast were much more prone to collaborate with other companies. Among employees, rapid changing of employers became a badge of honor.  Staying too long with one company was viewed with some suspicion. The opportunity to engage deeply with diverse collaborators and access tacit knowledge was far greater in Silicon Valley. 

Silicon Valley further enhanced this advantage by emerging as a more effective global talent magnet, attracting skilled and entrepreneurial engineers from around the world. People often overlook this aspect of Silicon Valley in seeking to uncover the “secret sauce” driving SV’s success, yet it has been central to the innovation that has been a hallmark of this talent magnet.  The ability to attract and retain talent from around the world drives the continuing success of Silicon Valley.  Current patterns of talent flows have been impressively documented in Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network’s Index of Silicon Valley 2007. Its report notes that “Silicon Valley’s population is increasingly more global in character than in California or the U.S.”

A New Basis for Competition

Now, as we move into the 21st century, a new dynamic is beginning to play out.  As captured by Annalee Saxenian in her more recent book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy, Silicon Valley capitalized on globalization to build a rich network of personal and institutional connections with emerging talent spikes in Israel, Taiwan, China and India.  In many cases, these connections arise as successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who came here from abroad return to their home countries to participate in local spikes.

Saxenian does a great job of describing the connections that are emerging and evolving across these talent spikes but, from my perspective, this is just the first step in the next wave of global competition.  We need some profound institutional innovation to more effectively harness the capabilities that are developing in spikes around the world. 

On this dimension, I fear that Silicon Valley companies are falling behind more innovative Asian companies. A number of Asian companies are mastering the management techniques and institutional architectures of process networks required to access and mobilize talent across hundreds or thousands of business partners on a global scale.  While many Silicon Valley companies participate in process networks, very few have successfully organized and orchestrated these process networks.

The Bottom Line

Place still matters in shaping talent development and competition. Place matters because density matters. Density increases opportunities for serendipitous encounters and sustained and rich collaboration. Place not only matters; it is becoming even more important and much more complex. 

Depending on whether you zoom in or zoom out, relevant spikes emerge at the neighborhood, metropolitan or global level.  In fact, they are fractal, down to the level of corridors and work areas within specific buildings. Some companies have developed explicit location strategies, seeking to locate facilities in key spikes in an effort to attract local talent.  Far fewer companies have successfully tackled the challenges of effectively connecting talent across geographic spikes in ways that accelerate learning and talent development.  Technology tools can help support these efforts, but the real opportunity is to define new environments that foster productive friction on a global scale. In a flat world, where you stand really does matter.

Restoring Balance in the New Year

A new year is upon us and it is time to make those resolutions, promising ourselves that we will do better this year.

In keeping with this time-honored tradition, let me start with a firm resolution to up my game on this blog.  Over the past six months, my postings have tended to be few and far between.  I have been consumed with the challenge and excitement of building a new research center for Deloitte & Touche USA LLP here in Silicon Valley.  We are now up and running (well, at least walking quickly but still in stealth mode) so I feel comfortable devoting a little more time and attention to these postings. Of course, I continue to be hampered by my inability to master the art of the pithy blog posting – once I get started on one of these, it is really hard to stop.

This posting won’t be any different. In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, I’d like to offer a set of resolutions regarding some of the themes that I want to explore in the year ahead.  Many of these resolutions offer a contrarian take on some of the conventional wisdom floating around these days, especially in the Internet world.  Without revealing too much (at least not yet), this posting will offer a preview of some of the perspectives that will shape this blog over the next year.

I will explore the growing value of stability.  As I venture into the dot com corridors of Silicon Valley these days, I get more than a whiff of those heady days in the late 1990s when all moorings were cast aside and we plunged into the strong currents of change, celebrating the fact that “nothing will ever be the same.”  In the process of embracing change, though, we often lose sight of the paradox that stability becomes ever more valuable as more and more of our surroundings are put into play.  Institutions and individuals that understand where and how to offer stability will create enormous value in the changing times ahead.

I will explore the diminishing value of transactions.  Many of us have become enamored with the ease of doing transactions on the Internet.  One click shopping is deeply seductive.  The transaction mindset has even made headway on social networking sites where the ease of “inviting” friends has drawn many of us into an escalating game of building ever larger social networks of “friends.”  We talk glowingly about relationships on the Web, but too often when we take a closer look, we find that many of these “relationships” are simply transactions under a different guise. Focusing on transactions will guarantee diminishing returns. Deep relationships become increasingly valuable in times of widespread change (and, yes, I know that “weak ties” are also important, but not as a replacement for deep relationships – in fact, deep relationships are essential to capture the full value of weak ties).  Once again, institutions and individuals that understand where and how to build these deep relationships will have a significant advantage.

I will explore the diminishing value of advertising.  Ask the management team of any Internet business about revenue models and, more likely than not, you'll get the confident answer that advertising will provide the necessary revenue.  Even enterprise software businesses are beginning to consider advertising as a promising revenue source.  There’s no doubt about it, Internet advertising expenditures will continue to rapidly grow over the next several years. But I have more than a passing suspicion that advertising revenue streams are vulnerable in the longer term.  As the long tail of advertisers crowds onto the Internet and as customers become more protective of our attention, I suspect that online advertising will begin to run into seriously diminishing returns. Without developing the detail right now, let me suggest that traditional models of advertising where vendors pay for messages to be delivered to prospective customers will be challenged longer-term by various forms of collaboration marketing and advisory services where customers pay trusted advisors to recommend relevant products and services.  In the short-term, steadily improving algorithms for targeting ads will continue to draw advertisers onto the Internet and provide an attractive revenue source for Internet businesses. Unfortunately, this short-term advertising revenue growth has had a narcotic effect and made a lot of online businesses lazy. Longer-term, I anticipate that most businesses online will have to make money the old fashioned way – by offering products, services and experiences so valuable that people will actually pay money for them. Those who begin to develop this discipline today will profit in the long-term.

I will explore the growing value of place.  I have actually addressed this theme already.  As many of you know, I believe the world will become a lot more "spiky" , while paradoxically becoming flatter in terms of connectivity.  The much vaunted “death of distance” joins the “paperless office” as a too simplistic extrapolation of information technology. The more connected we become, the more intense our need to accelerate talent development will become.  People who come together in dense urban areas will be much more successful in developing their talent than those who remain isolated in remote rural areas, even if they have the best broadband connections.  Most people understand this.  That is why, on a global scale, the trend towards urbanization is accelerating rather than slowing down, even among the most wired digital elites in our younger generations. Place matters more than ever and where we choose to live will increasingly determine how successful we become.

I will explore the growing value of bold leadership.  In an era where the “wisdom of crowds” and empowerment are the watchwords of the digerati and where we generally have become increasingly cynical about the leaders of many of our largest institutions, we may lose sight of the importance of visionary leadership. We can take the notions of emergence and self-organization too far and dismiss the role of forceful leaders. In times of great uncertainty and rapid change, unprecedented opportunities arise to shape our environments to create even more value.  Shaping requires deep insight into the fundamental forces at work and powerful personalities to communicate conviction and persuade many who are on the sidelines that the rewards outweigh the risks. Even our most cited examples of collective intelligence, initiatives like Linux and Wikipedia, would have died stillborn (as most open source initiatives do) if it had not been for the forceful leadership of personalities like Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales. To be sure, this new generation of leaders employs a different set of techniques relative to more traditional leaders, but their leadership is essential to the success of these initiatives. Those who are able to exercise this forceful leadership and attract and mobilize others will reap significant rewards in the decades ahead.

I will celebrate length while appreciating brevity.  OK, this may be somewhat self-serving.  Having never mastered the art of the short form, I necessarily harbor a certain attachment to longer essays and, dare I say it, even the endangered book.  In times of rapid change, there is an understandable temptation to sample briefly and quickly from many sources, never lingering too long with any one idea or source.  As we race to keep up, we avoid or quickly discard anything that threatens to take up too much of our valuable time and attention.  But the risk is that we lose any sense of texture or deep structure that would help us to make sense of the changes going on around us and to make connections that might otherwise remain hidden in the whirlwind of events and distractions occupying our day. Vicious cycles begin to play out, where the more we surf from one source to another, the more sense of urgency we develop about falling behind amidst the rapidly proliferating long tail of resources available to us.  Those who invest the time to go below surface events and explore deep structures will be in a far better position to anticipate change and stake out positions that matter rather than simply racing to react to the latest unexpected event and spreading themselves precariously across to many fronts.

Before everyone jumps on me for the contrarian and somewhat retrograde views expressed above, let me hasten to add that I too appreciate the value of change, transactions, advertising, virtual connections, empowerment and brevity. Having recently returned from Vietnam, though, I have gained a renewed appreciation for the traditional Asian concept of yin and yang – two fundamentally opposing forces that come together to complete the world.  I simply want to restore some of the balance that we often lose when we get caught up in the events of the moment.  That’s the essence of my New Year’s resolutions – invest the time required to maintain balance in a time of great flux. I promise to be more frequent in my postings, but probably not a lot shorter.