The Pachyderm Post

Over ten years ago, before I re-entered corporate management for awhile, I spent years developing and delivering management and executive development programs for IBM in La Hulpe, Belgium.

At the time, I was also working with the company at their management development facilities in Armonk, New York and The Palisades , in New Jersey. I even hosted the entire Palisades management team for three days of strategy development and team-building in Nantucket, Mass.

But I have the fondest memories of La Hulpe, which was the headquarters for management and executive development for IBM in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at that time.

I’d actually attended executive development programs myself at this location, when I was an IBM Director of Marketing and Services and Director of Consulting Services.

The times that I spent developing and delivering personal and professional development programs in that environment were among the most rewarding of my professional life.

This was certainly so because those were times of great turmoil and ferment at IBM.

But it was more so because of the incredible opportunity to work with people of such different cultures and backgounds.

Developing and delivering programs for such an international audience tapped my knowledge of international relations, politics and cultures in ways that simply weren’t required in the U.S. alone.

Since so much of what I did was grounded in the professional and social realities of the participants, it was incredibly exciting to connect with Germans or French or Saudis on terms with which they were already familiar, and with references which already meant something to them.

So, it was sad for me to learn, in 1993, that IBM was dissolving their training and development operation in La Hulpe.

But I was thrilled to discover, over a year ago, that an American company – Dolce International – had acquired La Hulpe (as well as the other properties that I have mentioned) and planned to reopen it as a hotel, resort and conference center.

They are in fact reopening just this month.

It is an incredibly beautiful place now, particularly in comparison to the austere IBM esthetic of yore.

Apparently, they will offer first class hotel and resort services as well as conference and executive development programs, for which there is a keen need these days…more than ever.

I can’t wait to see how they do.

I wish them luck.

For the sake of the future of personal and professional development in Europe.

And for the sake of my memories…

VMB

I hardly remember my first day as a new manager at IBM in the fall of 1981.

In fact, the only event that I do clearly remember about that day started with being told by my secretary (remember secretaries?) that there was “a crazy man” on the phone who absolutely needed to talk to me “right now!”

I was in the middle of a tornado of new people, new responsibilities, a completely new environment, and a flurry of requests for my time…all of which needed to be attended to “right now!”

But something told me to take that crazy man’s call.

It was Sam Albert, IBM’s Director of Consulting Relations (if I remember the title correctly).

He might better have been titled “Tornado in Chief.”

In a torrent of words, made bearable only because I only picked up only half of them, he blasted me with the absolute urgent, “right now” need to invite a key customer of mine to a meeting that Sam was hosting that very week in White Plains, NY.

The fact that I had not yet even called to introduce myself to the new customer was only an incidental impediment for Sam, who had known the man for years.

Sam thoughtfully suggested introducing me to the new customer himself.

I demurred, thinking that this was a privilege best reserved for my new boss, the Branch Manager of Boston Public Sector and Commercial, Gale Fitzgerald. She and I were arranging schedules just that day.

She was new too, having just replaced John Thompson (now of Symantec fame…see earlier post), who had actually hired me into the branch.

In the midst of Sam’s word-torrent, it oddly occurred to me that, despite his actually incredible demands and expectations of me, I wasn’t irritated or upset in any way.

The man’s sincerity and passion for his objective was in no way disrespectful or anything but…sincere and passionate.

And I was deeply impressed that he – who’d known my customer for years, and could have called him directly – respected my role in building the customer relationship.

Before I knew it, I was juking and jabbing, trying to get a word in edgewise.

Not to put him off…his mission had now become mine, though I was only then beginning to understand its importance.

No, I was trying my rookie best to impress this “crazy guy” with my appreciation of the urgency of “our” effort to get this customer to Sam’s meeting.

All of this taking place in the span of about 60 seconds.

As Bogart said to Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

It was…and still is…

Sam was a friend, a mentor, and an all-round bon vivant, in the best possible sense of that over-used and so often wrongly used French phrase.

Sam truly did love life and living, and I do more because of knowing him.

Years later, when we’d both left IBM, and were independent consultants, Sam gave me a Yo-Yo (he was Yo-Yo champion at American University).

That Yo-Yo has always reminded me that life is up and down, but it can always be fun…always.

Sam died four years ago today.

Thanks, Sam, for showing us how to live.

vb

This is John Thompson. He may be one of the most important people you don’t know.

He’s not a professional athlete, though I know from personal experience that he’s got a good jump shot.

He’s not an actor, though he’s completely at home on stage.

He’s not a politician, though many think he should be, and many of those in political power would do well to emulate his candor and style.

He is a businessman, a CEO, actually. He’s the head of Symantec, of which – odds are – you are already, directly or indirectly, a customer and beneficiary.

Symantec is a computer software security company, whose best known products are the Norton line of products.

They, and a small list of other companies, are in the business of protecting computers like the ones you and I are on right now, from viruses, worms, trojan horses, spam and other scourges of the on-line world, the on-line world without which we would be plunged into a kind of technological Pre-History.

You know…before “the Google”, and “laptops”, and “mice”…but also possibly before “the police”, and “transportation”, and “food.”
When former U.S. cyber-terror czar Richard Clarke turned his hand to fiction recently, his book, Breakpoint, chronicles the disaster that a cyber-meltdown would certainly be, and not only to readers of blogs.

We in general have not the foggiest idea how profoundly disruptive a broad-scale attack on our cyber-infrastructure would be, and we do not grasp that the expertise to mount such an attack is improving and proliferating daily.

Here’s Thompson on this point:

“Once upon a time, the typical attacker was a young man or woman between 13 and 22 years old whose sole goal in life was to get some notoriety.

From 2002 to 2004, there were almost 100 high-profile virus attacks. In 2005, we had six.

But the rise in identity theft, the rise in online fraud, the rise in the criminal element’s involvement in attacks on consumers has gone exponentially up, from almost nothing to probably 25 percent to 30 percent of all the activity that occurs online.”

It is this rise in the serious criminal element’s role in cyber-crime which is ominous, because it provides the fertile ground for the proliferation and sophistication of cyber-terror technique.

Remember the movie “Swordfish, with John Travolta (the criminal bankroller) and Hugh Jackman (the cyber-genius).

The more “Travoltas” there are, the more “Jackmans” there will be, and the more “Jackmans” there are, the more opportunities for the bankrollers of terror to recruit experts in the disruption of commerce and society.

By the way, for “bankrollers of terror”, don’t even think Osama bin Laden. Think Hezbollah; think Iran; think North Korea.

The Terror of the Moment is rogue state nuclear proliferation, because it is, after all, serious, but also because it sells politically. People still remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But the potential impact of broad-gauge cyber terror dwarfs that of the odd nuclear device detonation, as awful as that would be, in fact and to our collective psyche.

Think H5N1 (the best known bird flu virus) meets an “enter” key on a terrorist’s keyboard in a secure bunker in northern Iran.

This is terror meeting horror.

And the nuclear dimension of this crisis is not terrorist possession of nukes, but rather U.S. tactical nuclear retaliation on that Iranian bunker.

And I haven’t even read Clarke’s book. Mine are the musings of a relative amateur.

Back to the professionals…

The key intersection of Thompson’s and Clarke’s roles and messages is that cyber-security must become a way of life, in a way that security in general has not yet done.

Security must be baked into the fabric of our lives – computer and otherwise.

This, by the way, is both the deep wisdom and the Achilles Heel of the Symantec/Veritas merger, brokered by Thompson.

Veritas specialized in data availability and validity, the fundamental point of cyber-systems.

This connection of security and fundamental operational infrastructure is a metaphor for what we must do in the larger society.

This is the wisdom.

Most folks have no idea or understanding of what I just wrote.

This is the Achilles Heel.

And Symantec’s Pachyderm Problem.

vb

I am delighted to announce the pending publication of a new series of books on generating change.

Change Generation – the first in the series – is the distillation of over thirty years of working with individuals and organizations to help them make change happen.

The book is a workshop manual for those who want to lead others in a change effort, whether it be in your company, church, synagogue or mosque, non-profit organization or government agency, or even your family.

It will be available in a normally-bound Executive Edition, and a spiral-bound Facilitator’s Edition.

We are less and less willing and able to make our lives happen for our true selves, and more and more willing to abdicate our right and power to make for ourselves the lives we deserve.

It is regularly said that one of the core competencies of living effectively in the twenty first century is the ability to cope with change.

This is true and good to a point, but it is self-destructive when coping becomes an end in itself.

The chaos of our personal and professional lives is so great that we generally cope by withdrawing, in one way or another.

Though this withdrawal may keep us from “coming unglued”, it is, beyond a certain point, no way to live.

The “glue” that keeps us together through crisis after crisis can accumulate with day after day of “coping.”

It can eventually gum up our emotional mechanism, making it difficult for us to respond to and engage with the world around us.

The same thing happens in organizations, making them progressively less responsive to the world around them, and less flexible in the face of new challenges and opportunities.

This is why I wrote Change Generation, to empower those of us who realize the perils of only “coping with change.”

I’ll let you know when it is available…

vb