How I Learn

Some Books I Was Reading the Month My Father Died

My father died on the afternoon of June 9, 2011. His passing will change how I live in the world, though I am not sure how, and may not really know for certain until I approach my own death. I wanted to pause this summer morning to remember him by remembering the books I was reading in June 2011. My father loved to read and always had a book nearby (the same is even more true of my mother) and he read widely. My own library has many books that he passed on to me, from teen adventure books from the time of WW2 - The Sacred Scimitar by William Dixon Bell (1938) and The Haunted Hanger by Van Powell (1922), to religious texts (last year I read the copy of Thomas a Kempis The Imitation of Christ that was given to him by a teacher in 1947), to many books on sailing and seamanship.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the
古今和歌集 Kokinwakashu edited by 紀 貫之 Ki no Tsurauki

These are two of four major reading projects this year (the other two being a renewed study of renga and a deep dive into The Psalms). Both were begun early in the year (January for Dickinson and March for the Kokinshu) and are likely to continue through the end of the summer. Both are helping me to think about my father, his life, and his passing.

769 (Johnson Numbering)

One and One – are One –

Two – be finished using –

Well enough for schools –

But for minor choosing –

 

Life – just – Or Death

Or the everlasting –

More – would be too vast

For the Soul’s comprising

 

Mothertalk by Mary and Roy Kiyooka edited by Daphne Marlatt

Roy Kiyooka has shaped my imagination from the late 70s when I first read Stoned Gloves and then The Fountainebleau Dream Machine. He was a trickster and elder when I moved to Vancouver in the late 1980s. This book of his mother’s memoirs was one of his last projects, and was in fact completed after his death by Daphne Marlatt (another Vancouver poet worth reading and rereading). I am looking for more copies as I would each of my kids to have this in their own libraries. My Amazon review is here.

Disavowals (Aveux non Avenues) by Claude Cahun translated by Susan de Muth & Agnes Lhermitte

I found this in the damaged section of the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge MA in May. A fascinating book on the construction and deconstruction of self and gender from the late 1920s. This book was being written in the years just before my father was born. One can lose oneself in Cahun’s photomontages.

Split Image by Robert Parker

When I am in Boston I like to unwind by reading a Robert Parker novel. At this best in the 1990s these books are easy to read, like drinking a glass of water, and take you into the city. Parker started to write his Spenser novels about the time I entered university, so reading them in chronological order has reminded me of many parts of my own life. This one is a Jesse Stone novel, and not Parker’s best, but at least it has some sailboats in it.

Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin

I have read the Earthsea Books many times. The Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices, Powers) is a slower and more meditative work but shares the theme of life choices. In Gifts the protagonists have to understand what their gifts are and how to use them. It sometimes seems to me that a big part of the work of one’s life is to understand what work one is meant to do and to have the courage to do it.

Jeff Wall – Picture for Women by David Campney and Gordon Matta-Clark – Conical Intersect by Bruce Jenkins

I am a big fan of Afterall’s One Work series and living in Vancouver Jeff Wall’s shadow is large. The Campney book gives some good entry points to think about the work, especially its self reference and construction. Matta-Clark’s Paris project Conical Intersect is haunting. The world opens in cracks that close again. Sometimes we can help to open them. Sometimes we can remember them. See …

The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming Medicine by Charles Kenny

Another reading theme for 2011 is healthcare and healthcare reform, especially in the US. This has nothing to do with the care given to my father, his palliative care was extraordinary. He died at home, holding my mother’s hand, with three of his children and one of his grandchildren beside him. This was possible because of who he was as himself and how he had lived his life, and the years of support he and my mother have given their extended family. This book tells the story of how the ideas from quality management have come into the healthcare system. There is a lot to learn here.

How Round Is Your Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin

My father was an engineer all his life and was good at making things – bridges of course, but he once said that anyone who can build a bridge should be able to figure out how to make a dress, and indeed, he did make dresses for my parents. He also taught me how to use a slide rule (I have forgotten) and how to do quick calculations of course and drift while sailing. This book is an enchanting exploration of where math, the physical world, and building stuff come together. In the real world, lines are thick, it is not easy to draw a straight line, and sometimes we need to have circles and squares with equivalent areas. This book opens up all sorts of interesting math by making physical models of mathematical ‘objects’. And it has a great chapter on slide rules.

Icefields by Thomas Wharton

Shortly after my father’s funeral Yoshie and I together with her sister and a close friend visited Banff and went up the Icefield Parkway and walked on the Athabasca Glacier. This revelatory novel is set here. The language captures the beauty and fear of the ice, its changes, and how Jasper itself has changed over the years. My parents had their honeymoon in this area back in 1958.

---

Thank  you Dad, for the books, the love of reading, and the passion to connect reading to life and action.

What I Cannot See From Where I Stand

 "5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this." (Wittgenstein TLP)

 

One of my current side projects is a workshop at the University of Toronto applying scenario thinking to urban futures. I am working on this with Bruce Stewart (Director of the iSchool Institute) and Kyle Dionne-Clark. As part of our preparation for the workshop Kyle and I are doing a series of blog  posts on scenario thinking on the iSchool Institute website.

A couple of weeks ago, Kyle suggested that we include a post on our own biases, which we did here. As part of this post, I reached out to people who know me reasonably well in a number of different frames: business, writing, cycling and family and asked for their views on my biases. I have tried to factor this feedback into some expanded thoughts on my own biases.

My life has been shaped by living at the intersection of cultures. I grew up mostly in Montreal in the 60s and early 70s, a time when language was a charged issue (to put it mildly) and teenagers challenged each other on the streets with linguistic slurs (I hope this has changed). I learned a rough street French and had some of my complacent middle-class Anglo assumptions thrown in my face. In my late teens I began to spend a lot of time in Japan (my parents were stationed there), moving to Tokyo when I was 19. Over the next decade or so I lived immersed in Japan and it was in Japan that I began to grow up (still working on this). I learned the language, lived very local in an old house in Kohoku (on the edge of Shitamachi), worked, got married, began to raise a family. As a result of my early life in Montreal and my immersion in Japanese in Tokyo I became suspicious of any one language’s ability to be complete – all expression is partial and it is in the gaps that the most interesting possibilities can be glimpsed. It may be a fault, not to be able to see completeness in any one thing.

This doubt of any one language (or system’s) ability to grasp the truth runs deep. I suspect that there are (infinitely) many internally consistent systems of mathematics, but that there is no one meta system by which one can interpret all the others in a way that makes them consistent. Beyond that, I suspect it is the inconsistencies and contradictions that blast open the space that allows anything to exist at all.

I am a committed learner, and how I learn is a filter through which I see the world. My learning style is abstract (I need to understand the model and how the parts fit together), historical (I like to go back to the very first germs of an idea and see what paths were not taken and how the selection occurred), connected (I try to find unexpected relationships) and social (I learn best through conversations with others). Oh yes, I read way too much, but cannot tolerate being told what to read (hence I have had a very limited academic career). I can get a bit anal about my reading, and for the past six years have kept track of all the books I read (I will share this with anyone interested).

Narratives are one of my many weak points. Stories are not my natural way of understanding the world or of being with others. My imagination and relationships are much more spatial and tangential; I am as likely to follow an implication or connotation as a deduction-I am easily drawn into adductive reasoning. Working for a living and managing companies, I have taught myself to tell stories, and more importantly, to listen to other people’s stories, but this is a conscious and learned behavior. I doubt I will ever write a novel or direct a movie, I may write a renga (if I can find the right collaborators) and I enjoy growing a garden.

Reading I like to be challenged by books that force me to uncover and build up new ways to read. The same is true for music, or even walking/riding through a city listening to its sounds. There are many ways to read any one book, and more ways to read several books together. Recently, I have begun to read translations of Japanese poetry into French (mostly haiku) and French poetry into Japanese (Mallarmé). My understanding of both languages is imperfect (as is my understanding of English) and my occasional failure to understand helps me read closer and to pay more attention.

I am always looking for things that force me to pay attention: reading poetry, listening to street noise, riding a bike downtown, sailing (especially in light winds or heavy weather), Yoshie's photos, working with a knife, following what people are saying to each other. Attention is, I suppose, at the heart of much of what I practice and not something I find easy.

Physical activity is critical to paying attention and I need to be physical or to find physical analogs in order to understand (when I say my learning style is abstract I should also say that it is physical, and that I need to express myself physically and encode knowledge into muscles and nerves). I like to sketch systems and then act them out (like a dance, though I am a poor dancer). If I was a better coder, I would want to code what I think about, and then to break the code.

By temperament I am an optimist, I believe things can be made to work out. When I think about the deep changes facing us - climate change, a post-oil economy, massive immigrations, species loss - I assume that we will find some way to work things out. I know that assets cannot continue to compound indefinitely (that is one root of bubbles) and that all funds must fail at some point, but I assume we will find other options.

My optimism leads me to be aggressively anti-ideology. For me, markets are a human technology and not a natural law (although I have learned a lot from Geermat Vermeiji’s application of economic theory to ecology in Nature: An Economic History). I am attracted to technologies that have mechanisms to distribute decisions as close as possible to where the decision will have an impact, and then integrate the decisions at a higher level to find insight and direction. Markets are one example (many individual decisions about value set prices and the prices provide information to the market), Google’s PageRank is another (individual decisions about what to link where determine relevance in search). The competition between alleles that partly determines subsequent phenotypes is yet another (I side more with Dawkins than Gould). I am convinced that the correct answer to most questions that start “What is the best way to ...” is “We don’t know and if we did know that in itself would change the answer.” Accordingly, I prefer evolutionary and adaptive solutions – encourage variation, force selection, repeat. I try to apply this to my own decisions as well – make a decision, see how I am wrong, correct.

Work experience shapes our biases. I have been either self-employed or running my own company since I was 26, apart from a two-year stint at the consultancy Monitor Group. As I am normally directly responsible for my own successes and failures I tend to assume that most problems have solutions and that the solution is to be found by building a team and having at it. Freedom matters, but with freedom to make a decision comes responsibility and accountability. I can be harsh in how I hold myself and others accountable. But I also believe that with every responsibility comes the right to freedom to determine how to meet those responsibilities.

My long term goal is to weave double-loop learning into everything that I do:  not just to learn, but to learn how I learn; not just to have goals but to have movement towards any goal change the goal; not just to connect (with people, places, ideas) but to have my connections become part of what I am connected with.

I have said too much here to really make sense, even to myself, but what am I not seeing …  ?

 

March Sommerville MA

.

Salt crust

On the floor under the bike

Unused for a month

. 

Oil crud & salt

Along the gutters

Early March

.. 

Pain evenly

Distributed along the back

More pain

 .

Making time

Across distance

Along a path

 .

Some snow

Fallen given a delicate

Wind chime

 .

Cough not cold

The road jitters

Skin raw

 .

After a long ride

Licking salt from her face

Broken skin

 .

Alcohol exhaled

Harsh breath bone bruised

Lip split

 .

Shirt sour

After two days riding

Continued effort

 .

Flat pain

Dull light missing Yoshie

Possibly morning

 .

The cup cold

Until water heats it

Tea steeps

 .

A hot shower

Then dry towels and

A clean pressed shirt

 .

Silence not

Memory as night angles

Fade to light

 .

You are here

As much as I can bear

You not being here

(Patricia Highsmith The Price of Salt filtered through Michael Snow’s Wavelength).

What to Record

I learn by returning to what I have tried to learn before. A little distance allows more depth of field, and a greater distance can let some patterns open up. So I keep some records of what I am trying to learn, and some of what I do, and come back to these at regular intervals to pause and reflect.

I am not sure that I am recording the most important things. Most days I note down where I slept that night and anything exceptional that occurred. Sometimes I will write down the details of an insignificant event, that I try (but cannot) choose at random. If I have a dream I may put it on my FaceBook page (I keep access to my Facebook down to a small number of friends and family). I enter in my weight, resting heart rate and blood pressure, how far I ride my bike and if there were any significant hills. Sometimes I’ll comment on road conditions. If I come across an interesting website, and I do most days, I capture it into CrowdTrust, and if I think it may be of broader interest I will send it out on Twitter or add it to FaceBook. Importantly for me, I record what books I am reading and a bit about each book. I used to note down the key references I discovered in reading a book, to let me weave a larger web of relations. These days I tend to just add these to my wish list on Amazon. I am trying to keep a ‘decision record’ of the type that Peter Drucker recommends, but as I do not make life altering decisions all that often (or if I do I am not aware that I am doing so) I find it hard to weave this technique into my own process of observing, revisiting and revising a little every day.

Every weekend I write down my priorities for the coming week and share these with my colleagues (we use an internal Semantic MediaWiki for this). This includes some notes on what I am learning and trying to learn. I encourage (with only middling success) other people to do this as well, and when they do it usually changes my own learning priorities. If one of my colleagues is trying to get a fix on, say, the use of metaphors in marketing, I will also follow this thread, as I am easily swayed, or try to be.

Every month I set aside a few hours to go back and think about what I was reading, thinking, doing at that month in past years. I have records going back more than five years now (and I wish I had started to do this much earlier). This is a simple but surprisingly powerful technique. It gives me a feeling for the longer, under the surface flows in my interests. I think of it as a way to loop sutures from one month to another across the years.

And once a year, usually between Christmas and New Year, I will take a few days to study the trends in what I am doing and sketch out a concept map of how the pieces are fitting together.

Almost every July I find myself reading something about the Tour de France. In winter I tend to be reading some form of longer poetry, either a collected works or an epic poem, often something in translation.

• 2003 Collected Poems, Basil Bunting

• 2004 The Cantos by Ezra Pound

• 2005 The Inferno, Alighieri Dante, translated by Robert & Jean Hollander

• 2006 Isla Negra: A Notebook by Pablo Neruda translated by Alastair Reed

• 2007 The Gem Glistening Cup: Waka Anthology, translated by Edwin Cranston

• 2008 The Dream of the Poem Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain, translated by Peter Cole

• 2009 The Book of Songs (Shijing), Arthur Waley translation

Looking back on what I read gives me a chance to look for some balance. I try to read a mix of business, economics and technology books, and mix in math, art and philosophy. In 2008 I even did an analysis of the original language and the gender of the author of the books I read. To my mild surprise, I found that most of the books I read were by white men writing in English (about 60%). If I left poetry and novels out of the calculation, about 80% of the books I was reading came from this narrow group. So this year I am trying to broaden my range, and I am actively searching for business and economics books, written by woman, from outside of Canada and the United States. (This is proving to be more difficult than I expected, North American culture mostly looks in on itself, and it takes a real effort to look outside, but more on that another time.)

As I track my cycling everyday, and have set up a number of reports so that I can compare how much I am cycling and how it correlates with my weight (not much) and my resting heart rate (the more I cycle the lower my resting heart rate). A good hard ride with a few wind sprints goes a long way to controlling my blood pressure. I am now looking for some relations between my riding and my writing, a first hint of which can be found in my winter cycling lines (I am working on a spring cycle as well).

The passage from recording to reflection is still only single-loop learning, and I hope to return to this at some point and think through the movement from learning to recording to reflection and back to action in terms of double-loop learning. The concept of double-loop learning comes from Chris Argyris inspired by Gregory Bateson and second-order cybernetics. It reminds me a little of the need to stand beside in Zen meditation practice. Over time, my ambition it to build double-loop thinking into work and the systems we design and take to market, into my own learning and what I share with others, and into my relationships with Yoshie, our children, our friends and the larger circles I move in.

Sharing Things

 One way that I learn from my wife Yoshie is from the things we have around our apartment. We are living in a small fourth-floor walkup in Boston’s South End. The apartment is at the top of the building and puts us close to the sky. Yoshie brings many things home from our walks, or sees things in small pieces and cuttings that most people (myself included) would throw away. Studying these things, or just having them in the periphery of awareness as I work, infiltrates and shapes my thought in ways I am just beginning to understand.

I am not sure where this hour glass came from but it has become an important part of my mornings. I am usually up before dawn and one of the first things I do is turn this and let the grey sand begin to trickle down. By May there is usually some light and a tracing of bird song in the air by the time the sand is all at rest in the bottom of the glass. It is not quite an hour glass, it runs through a cycle in about 49 to 53 minutes. I am not sure what causes the variation, perhaps humidity.

 

 

Our apartment is full of the ends of things --- bits of wire, cloth scraps, notes with a few words, bike parts, whatevers. One thing one finds quite often is the slowly drying roots of foods we eat. The white rootlets of green onions are often lined up along the mantle in a study of how form is sharpened as an object dries. These are the roots from a couple of heads of red cabbage, several months old by now. They are dry and a bit brittle, and though you can’t see it in this photo (all the photos in this post are my own clumsy efforts) the way in which the leaves join with the stem can be seen much better than it could back when we were eating this in fall salads.

 

The painting is from my childhood. It is by Brenda Wallace, a close friend of mother’s, who for many years had one of the most interesting galleries in Montreal. I grew up dreaming about these shapes, and brought the painting back to Boston from Ottawa almost a year ago. It is on the bookshelf above the hour glass, the cloaked forms giving depth to the wall and a way back into memory.

Most weekends Yoshie and I will go for a long walk somewhere around Boston. We often take a train first, the commuter rail system around Boston is quite wonderful for getting out of the city and seeing the small New England towns that are so much the social fabric of Massachusetts. I ride through many of the same towns on my longer bike rides, but walking (especially with Yoshie) is a different experience. I hope that over the decades, as the car culture fades away, that the Lower Mainland of British Columbia will grow a network of small towns like this. The scale is human and democratic. This tin can was picked up on the road from Brockton station to the Fuller Craft Museum. I pinned the shoe insert underneath it to remind us of the walk.

Anything that reminds one of the sea and its wrack is good. Yoshie found this piece of rope on the beach at Rockport on Cape Anne. For some reason it makes me think of Richard Serra’s work, though I have no idea why. It also brings back memories of sailing trips. Once, many years ago, we were motoring south outside of Tokyo Bay in a thick fog and a dead calm, skirting the coast of the Chiba peninsula to stay out of the shipping lanes. We fowled a large water-logged cable, and I spent half an hour in the April ocean with a knife cutting us clear. That was as cold as I ever need to be. The rope on our wall, with its frayed ends and faint sea stink, has two tight splices, quite well done, the work of strong hands.

Yoshie works with her hands and there are usually small examples of her work here and there on the table or counters. Her main work desk is covered with the tools of her trade. Small pliers and hammers, scissors, files, crotchet hooks and the materials she works with – industrial paper and packing materials, wires, bits of plastic, small beads and strange little plastic knick-knacks in well organized patterns. I could spend a long time thinking about these patterns and what she keeps in hand’s reach. Most of my own work is with words or in conversations. It helps me to see the small tools she works with and it reminds me how important the hand and human touch is to shaping the mind.

  Sometimes she hangs her work on the wall in the entrance hall. Coming home and finding new forms on the wall sparks all sorts of new ideas for me. The piece on the left here was made for an exhibition on art made from found objects. It includes egg cups, old gold brocade, and the knit wire forms that Yoshie is known for. Hanging there, with the door to the fuse box as background …

People who work with me know that I like to have books around. I even read some of them. Being able to walk into a room and see the patterns of ideas suggested by a collection of book spines is a special joy, and I like to watch how the sequences of books on the shelves evolve over time. I tend to pull twenty or thirty books off our stacks over the course of a week. I may not actually read any of these, just glance through the index or read a few pages. Sometimes it is just the colour of the cover that catches my eye. At some point the books have to go back on the shelves and I usually just deposit them in groups wherever they happen to fit. So the books found together are sometimes a good picture of my interests at a point in time, until they get shuffled back into the general shelves, pulled out for more careful reading, or given to friends. I wonder how this will work for me with eBooks. I expect to use a Kindle or some similar device soon, if only to leave some room in the apartment for something other than books.

This yellow construction was also picked up on the shore of Cape Anne on a trip soon after we moved to Boston. I think it broke off a piece of fishing equipment. Cape Anne is important to us for its association with the port Charles Olson, who lived many of his most productive years in the major fishing port of Gloucester. We use it to prop the back door open (the door opens onto a deck some fifty feet above the back gardens, level with the tree tops). Sometimes I bring this piece of scrap to the table and keep it by me as I work. The worn yellow with corrosion showing through, the repeated cubes, the combination of past use and present, what, something anyway, helps me to focus and keep going. The sea is a hard way, and people who fish have more knowledge and make a harder effort at greater risk than most of us. This piece of scrap, picked from the rocks with a large sea running, seems to me as important as any work I am likely to do.

Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker

In March 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker published an article in Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself. Drucker, who was born in 1909 and died in 2005, published this at the age of ninety, and it distills the thoughts of an emotionally and intellectually rich life. There is much good advice here for anyone who wants to better understand, foster and share their own learning and to make it part of a successful life.

The article was recently republished in book form by Harvard Business School Press. This is a small book, only 64 pages it can be read in a few hours. But it repays close reading and thought, so I will not begrudge HBSP this repackaging. It is nice to have this in a bound form to keep handy and to give on to other people.

The key messages are

• Know ones strengths through analysis of the outcomes of ones decisions
  
• Understand how one performs, or gets things done
  
• Understand how one learns
  
• Know ones values and work in organizations that support them
  
• Know where one belongs and what one contributes
  
• Be responsible for ones relationships
  
• Plan for more than one career

Decision Records and Understanding Performance & Learning

Drucker feels that the best way to understand ones strengths is to keep a record of ones decisions. Each time you face a major life decision, write down what you have decided, what the alternatives were and what you expect the outcomes to be. Then periodically revisit the decision and see what the actual outcomes have been. Eventually you will get a feeling for what you are good at. Your decisions will improve and you will learn to focus your time and energy on what makes you successful.

I seem to be facing my fair share of decisions over the past few years, and I adopted Drucker's approach in 2005 when I left Recombo, a company I helped to found. At that time the basic decision was whether to (i) go back to school and maybe get a Ph.D., (ii) start another company, (iii) do some consulting, or (iv) take a position at a larger company. I began with the consulting as a way to defer a decision and then when an opportunity came up I joined Monitor Group, a consultancy in Cambridge MA. My goals in joining Monitor and the results to date are sketched out below.

• To see how I would perform in a larger organization
  
  So far so good, my main struggles have been with not having direct control over the larger decision making process and not having deep visibility into finances. I find both of these deeply frustrating. The learning made possible at Monitor, especially the opportunity to work with thought leaders such as Bruce Chew, Tom Nagle and my boss Jonathon Levy has been astonishing, and I am learning as quickly here as I have at any time in my life (I have zero tolerance for situations where I am not learning full tilt).
  
• To understand how big-time consulting works and see if it suits me
  
  I have learned an enormous amount about how the consulting business works and about key frameworks, especially in marketing, pricing and decision making, and how these are implemented in very large companies. Consulting itself does not really suit me as I prefer to be engaged in building teams and creating innovative products - again, this has something to do with being able to shape things directly, whereas consultants work through analysis and persuasion
  
• To experience living in the US and come to understand it better
  
  I am a committed citizen of Vancouver and am deeply engaged in the art, writing, food and music of that city. But I spent ten years of my life in Japan and have lived in Europe as well. Living in these other cultures has helped me to see Canada and Vancouver more clearly. But I lacked the perspective of our closest neighbour, which also happens to be the world's most powerful country. And we have chosen a good time live in the US: a presidential election year, during a financial crisis, with infrastructure crumbling, as the semantic web emerges from research groups like MIT (I cycle by it everyday and should spend more time interacting with researchers there), Stanford and Rensselaer and begins to be applied in real-world applications, and (I am being optimistic here) hints of a cultural rebirth can be seen in music, street art and poetry. Do I understand the US? Not sure that one can understand another person, let alone a country. But I surely have a more honest and informed perspective and a deeper affection for the people. I can also see that I want to live in Vancouver in the long-term.

Values and Contribution

If an organization does not share your values then don't work there. End stop.

Understand how you best contribute and make sure the organization supports you in contributing in that way. And if it does not, create a new job, either in the same organization, at a different organization, or somewhere you create with your partners.

I believe I best contribute to an organization in three ways

• Idea shaper and instigator - I am not sure how original my thinking is, but I have a good ability to take ideas from different disciplines and to blend them into new constellations that can be applied to solve real problems
  
• Team leader - I enjoy and think I am quite good at building teams and making each team member successful
  
• Pattern detector - I am reasonably good at spotting long-term economic, technical, social and cultural trends and injecting them into ideas I am trying to shape and teams I am trying to build

On the other hand, I am not a skilled administrator and my sales quotient is no better than average (unfortunate as I have learned to enjoy sales). I can only work effectively on a team where I can help other people to use their own strengths and cover my deficiencies.

Working with my wife, object maker and photographer Yoshie Hattori, over the past almost three decades has also helped me live into my values and contribute to our families growth. And she, quite simply, helps me to see better!

Relationships and Career

Drucker points out that most of us can and should expect to keep on working as long as we keep on living, but that most of us will not want to stay in one career for forty or fifty years. We need to build a wide net of people that will help us and guide us in our decisions over our life and these people should come from many different areas.

I invest a lot of time in my network of friends and colleagues (and I don't separate the two groups) and in meeting and talking to al sorts of different people. But I am doing less well in thinking through what an alternative career might be! Whatever it is, it will probably involve starting a company or founding a non-profit organization. Some possibilities - a store that sells odd things from every part of industry and design, a small restaurant, a company giving art tours for older people, a company giving art tours for children, a non-profit for people raising children in more than one language or for people who have no first language, an institution to research long-term patterns of all types ...

Suggestions?