Link follows:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.podesta.html

∆ >br>London, England

We were supposed to have a quick lunch meeting with the CIO, but a man three seats in front of us on the plane from Vienna had what appeared to be a heart attack, so our flight made an emergency landing in Frankfurt. Then we had to reclaim our baggage and rebook onto a later flight out of Dusseldorf, so we made a frantic call. Slip over here for more ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/opinion/23mon3.html

∆ >br>Frankfurt, Germany

I was sick. We’d carefully planned the workshop. I was the lead dog. Amy was playing backup.

So I had a responsibility to deliver on my commitment. But just before noon on the third day, feeling as though I had spent the morning trudging through chest-deep snow, I bailed out. Slip over here for more ...

The Ice Cube or Vapour Box

The relationship between consumer and supplier features unending contradictions. While the consumer desires products that they control, ones that cost nothing to buy, take up no space, are infinately speedy, are of infinite high quality, are infinitely easy to use, and free to operate, suppliers require that one or more of these desires go unsatisfied in order to survive. The relationship is an unending battle to see how long any supplier will retain control over the relationship, and the customer will always ultimately, eventually win.
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Legal Maneuvers

9:35am, October 14, 1913. The office of Wyndam, Colbert, and Weese, Attorneys At Law, Westfield Mass.

Present: Godfrey Wyndam, senior partner, and Hiriam Hull III, President of the Westfield Whip Company.

Locating The Vapor Point

That Spring of 2001, across the country in Portland, Oregon, True North project guidance strategies, the two-person training and strategic consultancy I’d founded eight years earlier, was barely keeping up with the burgeoning demand for our services. Following a humbling slowdown before Y2K, our client list had expanded to just beyond our ability to confortably service it. Where prior years had seen us make the occasional ten day trip, this year would see me in 53 different hotel rooms, some for as long as two contiguous weeks. One client had prepaid a year’s fees, and cash flow was more positive than ever in the company’s history.
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The TidePoint Debacle

Part two of my 2003 work about discontinuous change...

No Language Describes It

We have no language to describe a vapourization, just like we have no satisfying description of death. We imagine, we might even find the faith to believe in an afterlife, yet we can search the archives and leave only certain that we’ve found no objective first hand account of what happens next. We describe from painful, shared experience the process of coping with the death of others, but find nothing but obscure scripture written in allegory, like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to guide the steps of those passing away. We have descriptions of reinvention and re engineering, but these are continuous changes, where someone can track the differences between the old and the new. We can only characterize the missing spaces, the voids left behind by those who leave us. We cannot track their journeys once they leave.
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Comments

Today is my father's 83rd birthday. I wrote this poem for him. Many happy returns!

In 2003, I spent a few months working with Peter DeJager on a book about what he called Vapourization (note the Canadian spelling. Peter's Canadian.) Vapourization describes what happens when an industry becomes moot. Like when refrigeration replaced ice men. Like when automobiles co-opted the buggy whip industry. That book didn't find a publisher, but some of my best writing emerged out of that project. I'll snip some pieces into blog-sized bites. Here's a first piece. david

I hear lots of rumbling about how we, the people, should impeach President Bush. Now that he’s admitted to initiating this wiretap scheme, claiming that Congress granted him a right which it explicitly denied him and that he’s simply fulfilling a duty of his office, the Internet is filled with virtual pitchforks and burning torches. Voices clamoring for his head.
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