Living Here Intentionally

Written for Kannon Do Zen Meditation Newsletter 2015.  

Silicon Valley is our home—and it is also our state of mind.  Idealistic, capitalistic, and fundamentally utopian by nature, we gather here to find like-minded people, excite our intellects, and stack our ideas pursuing dreams of personal success and human progress.

We spend much of our time in the reflection of these dreams, living dynamic lives that stimulate and inspire.  And why not feel inspired, even lucky?  We live under remarkably fortunate conditions—our lives are compelling, we drive the greatest economy on earth, and the rest of the world aspires to be just like us.  We are arguably more comfortable than at any time in human history.

Yet even with such extraordinary fortune, some of us lose our bearings in our daily lives or feel that something is missing.  We begin to lack energy or focus, treat others less kindly, or have trouble sleeping.  We find ourselves becoming more interested in topics like “mindfulness” or considering ways to better address matters of the spirit.

These are the conditions that bring us to Kannon Do, and those of us who come find an open and welcoming place.  We soon discover that Kannon Do provides us a unique environment for introspection, community involvement, and the exploration of relationships, interests, and spirituality.

Unlike the popular view that Zen is an effortless, go-with-the-flow endeavor, it is not an “easy” path.  The practice itself takes effort.  Still as we become more fully engaged, the practice does become more effortless and second nature.  You brush your teeth, you kiss your loved ones, and you sit “zazen”.  And the more we practice, the more we are challenged, clarified, and comforted.

In contrast with the way that most of us feed our Silicon Valley dreams with adrenaline soaked activity, our Zen practice is a unique mix of quiet self-exploration coupled with a more genuine expression of ourselves within our families, communities, and world at large. 

Kannon Do offers the silence that helps us distill the many bits of our lives, allowing these fragments to assemble and present themselves in fuller relief to both ourselves and others.  The process is intentional, organic, and dependent on both our meditative practice and our shared experience.  And this combination of inner awareness and external expression provides the grounding needed to live the more authentic and worthwhile lives that many of us so deeply desire.

Bringing Life to Each Moment: A Zen Priest Interview

Written for Kannon Do Zen Meditation Newsletter 2015.  

Om Devi is a Zen priest, ordained by Les Kaye in July of 2000. She moved from the Bay Area to Casco, Maine in 2002, where she lives with her husband, Eric Dibner and their two cats.  This article is a compilation of two extended discussions that we had during the second half of August, 2015.

Dan.   Om Devi, good to speak with you.  How’s the summer going for you in Maine? 

Om Devi.  Well, I’m sitting with our cats in the back of our house, and I’m overlooking field and forest.  And the apples in the orchards are just beginning to ripen.

Dan. Sounds nice.  Would you tell me a bit about yourself and your experience with Zen and Kannon Do?

Om Devi. I found my way to Kannon Do in 1987, but I’d kind of meditated from an early age. I grew up on a farm and dreamt of being a dancer, but I contracted polio so I spent a lot of time roaming the farm, sitting quietly and watching nature.  I had a wonderful teacher in sixth grade, she was well traveled and thought more broadly about the world.  I remember writing a poem in that class about “the beauty of snow on branches”.  Oh, and my cousin is the one that wound up doing the dancing in New York City!

I did some Zen meditation at college, Rochester Institute of Technology, where I graduated as an art major in 1971 and then I mediated at the early Rochester Zen Center. It was at a time when American Zen seemed to me to be almost all men and very disciplined. I felt a bit insecure when I came in with leg brace and crutches, but I wondered how to negotiate the zendo without the brace. I then studied yoga with a master in the Bay Area from 1976 through 1980 , and have practiced Buddhist meditation since. But it wasn’t until 1987, when I did a one day sesshin and had dokusan with Les Kaye, that I felt that I had finally met my teacher.

Dan.  So you’ve done most of your formal Zen practice with Kannon Do?

Om Devi. Yes. Although I’ve lived in different places and sat in other zendos with other people and groups including those of Trungpa Rinpoche, Seung Sahn, Richard Baker, and Joan Halifax, I’ve taken my precepts (Boddhisatva vows), been ordained, participated in practice period at Green Gulch Farm in 2001 and served as Susho (Head Monk) at Kannon Do in 2008.

Dan. How does living in Maine affect your practice?

Om Devi.  Unlike the flow of people that you have in Mountain View, the rural setting reduces the number of people who can practice together.  And practicing alone is harder. I’ve started a group in the area and have people come to my home to sit, but it can be hard to encourage people to practice when they must drive 30 minutes over bad roads to sit zazen.

But this situation does force me look at my attachment to practicing with others.  Actually, we are not alone when we are sitting because as we sit there are others around the world who are sitting as well.

Dan. Are there other challenges for you now?

Om Devi. Any person with a disability has to face the activities of daily living in a very different way.  Cleaning, dressing, everything takes a long time.  Pain, too, can tire me out because my body then wants to rest and sleep is often interrupted by pain. And then winter in general makes it harder to get anywhere. Ice on driveways makes it very tough to operate a wheelchair and driving in snow is also difficult let alone maneuvering out of the van once I reach a destination.  

Dan. So when do you have time to practice? 

Om Devi.  Oh, I practice all the time. For instance, when I wash the dishes I try to make my awareness available. That is the point.  We are not separate from the Zendo.  Dogen said practice is enlightenment and enlightenment is practice. It’s important how we focus on each day. 

For me, my body is a lifelong Koan.  When my body doesn’t work or my wheelchair messes up, I get a little closer to anger flashpoints. The anger is not a problem, the point of practice is to just see the anger before it rises. We don’t want to suppress, we want to observe.  Take a breath and return to the moment. In the process of observing and returning to our moment and breath, the problem gets smaller over time and starts to go away.  More importantly the awareness changes our perspective of the problem.

Dan. What encouragement would you give to someone new to Zen?

Om Devi. Be patient. Don’t have expectations. Don’t bother the thoughts.  Don’t invite them in for tea.  The brain’s function is to make thoughts, so just return to the breath. Don’t count on an outcome.  It’s just this moment that is the reward.  

Dan. What encouragement would you give to someone who has done zen for many years?

Om Devi. Beginner’s mind. Keep going at it. Don’t give up. You never really can leave zen practice anyway.  It is part of you, you can’t leave it. I also think that a teacher is important, because we can become lopsided in our practice. We may not be able to know what to do with some things that arise.  It’s just helpful for encouragement too. And I’ve always felt that Kannon Do makes no discrimination between body and ability. It is a welcoming place.

And, finally, I’d like to offer the same question to others that my teacher would ask of me, “What is the appropriate response at each moment”?

Big Data Hot Spots: Vertical Market Opportunities

I went to a conference provided by one of the Big Data platform leaders last week, and I was struck by the lack of persuasive reasons presented for aggressively moving forward with broad scale Big Data projects. There were a couple of customers discussing their experiences but their focus was architectural and operational rather than business minded. Instead of tangible use case, vertical application, and ROI successes and proof points, there was an implicit assumption that skyrocketing growth in data volumes meant that Big Data deployments would soon take over the IT world, and that by inference, this early-to-market vendor would necessarily be a market leader. 

I call this rationale the "Chicken Little approach" because we can't validate a technology movement just because an industry or a vendor makes a lot of noise. (In this case, the Big Data technology boom is implicitly assumed to be valid because start-ups and chunks of data are falling from the sky!) And as far as the vendor is concerned, we can't ordain it a long-term industry leader just because it is early to market with a Big Data platform.

Customers will not bet their jobs on unproven business assumptions and the promise of higher performing computing. At the very least, Big Data vendors must demonstrate better business results for their customers, offer value or cost benefits that far outshine current alternatives, and provide some hard assurances that any departure from a customer's existing infrastructure would be in sync with the industry and would be fully supported for the foreseeable future. 

As a Marketing guy, there are several directions I’d take to prove the advantages of Big Data solutions to the business community including characterizing the opportunity by industry vertical, identifying key use cases that resonate with the market, and providing vendor specific unique proof points and value propositions. I'd first identify the key verticals to approach because use cases and value propositions become more tangible and persuasive when they are validated by vertical. The rest of this blog focuses on one of several approaches that could be used to identify the most likely vertical targets for Big Data vendor offers. 

The chart below is from the October 2011 McKinsey Quarterly. It's two years old but still relevant. I like the McKinsey analysis because it suggests near-term opportunities, e.g., finance and insurance, and promising verticals in the mid to long-term, e.g., the real estate market. This chart also forecasts the economic impact (GDP) that should occur as these industries take advantage of Big Data technologies. For instance, Big Data is predicted to provide an enormous lift for the Real Estate business.

This McKinsey analysis provides a comparative view of the many potential verticals that could be considered. The vendor who takes the more targeted vertical approach to market is far more likely to persuade business decision makers to get serious about Big Data and to include that vendor in their Big Data IT deployment plans. 

Look for my next blog which will explore the key use cases driving Big Data today.

Assessing a Business...Simply

Silicon Valley is largely made of two types of people. The first type tends to roil in complexity and detail and, left to their own devices, would develop products and services that may work well but may never solve a meaningful customer problem. And the second type tends to work at the aspirational and visionary level but often does not have the operational "chops" to bring their vision to market.

Technology leaders and individual contributors alike need to figure out ways to bridge this gap. That's why I appreciate simple and direct frameworks for evaluating business and project opportunities--so that we can cut through the noise and describe an opportunity in simple terms for all technology audiences. Here's a framework that I think is simple, direct, and powerful.

This framework was invented by Alexander Osterwalder and is included in a book named, Business Model Generation.  I was introduced to this through a blog from a Redpoint VC.  I like this model because it provides a "back of the envelope" way of capturing what a business offers, how it reaches customers, and its likelihood of profitability and success.  And we all can understand it.

Let Pablo Eat! A Management Lesson in Encouraging Peak Performance at Work.

Pablo Sandoval with his MVP Trophy, Oct. 28th, 2012

Last night the San Francisco Giants won Major League Baseball’s World Series Championship. That’s two championships out of the last three years for San Francisco’s “boys of summer.” And the Most Valuable Player Award at the World Series went to SF’s Venezuelan born Pablo Sandoval. 

Sandoval, nicknamed "Kung Fu Panda," hit three homeruns in Game One of the Series joining the elite group of Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Albert Pujols as the only players in MLB history to hit three home runs in a World Series game. 

The back story on Pablo Sandoval is that he is a very gregarious twenty-six year old who is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs anywhere from a sturdy 230 to a corpulent 270-plus pounds during the baseball season. Since coming into the majors as a Giant in 2008 Sandoval has achieved a very solid .303 career batting average. And although he is widely embraced by fans, many of whom wear "Panda hats" at Giant games, he is universally criticized for his weight which visibly increases as the baseball season wears on. Coupled with criticisms of his free swinging ways at the plate, the rap on Sandoval is that he lacks the discipline to ever become a great player.

As seen at Highway 101 and Great America
Parkway  at 9 a.m.  this morning.

Much like the Sandoval's critics, the majority of high tech managers tend to focus on employee weaknesses rather than strengths. Case in point, when was the last time you were called into your boss’s office for doing a good job? In our age of information and ideas, wouldn't it make more sense to encourage our knowledge workers to build upon their best skills and talents rather than inordinately focusing on their deficiencies? Don't we want them to occasionally make breakthroughs rather than just focusing on making baby steps forward?

Hey, I’m no Pollyanna. I am all about excellence and understand that every manager needs to identify and correct employee deficiencies if their companies and cultures are to improve. But let’s start balancing our focus on correcting employee behavior with a commensurate amount of encouragement for our people to improve upon those things that they already do well.

Often companies achieve their most outstanding results when they get out of the way of their people and encourage them to do what they do best—even as their people continue to have weaknesses in other work areas. This approach is not that different from the sentiment of many of us around the Bay Area today who, in light of the Panda's sublime athleticism and accomplishments, are finally starting to say, “Let Pablo Eat!"

Gartner thinks that Big Data will be really BIG!

Gartner just came out with their Big Data IT spend forecast for the five year period of 2012 through 2016. It's a jaw dropping, but I think reasonable, sum of $232B through 2116 (Details on Tech Crunch). That's an average of $46B of spend a year--or ~1.5% of the total global IT spend of $2.7 trillion a year (Gartner's Global IT Spend). That's what a Google or a Cisco did in total revenue over the past year. Or from a software company perspective, that's a 2012 Oracle plus three 2012 Salesforces in sales. We're talking a significant disruption and growth here. Choose a seat near the front of the plane and buckle your seat belt.

May the Best Technology Win (Don't Bet on it!)

In my earlier post, “Breakthrough Technology Markets are Made Not Found,” I made the case that emerging technology markets do not occur on their own but are instead created. This flies in the face of the many technically inclined people who believe that, in open markets, the best idea and the best technology wins. I strongly believe that marketing and awareness, distribution, price, and standardization are each more important to a breakthrough technology’s success than are the merits of the technology itself.  The following examples act as my proof points:

>Tokenring and Ethernet networking (1980s).  Tokenring is a more predictable and elegant network architecture but Ethernet is simpler and is…well…good enough. 

>Pure Digital’s Flip Camera and mobile phone cameras (2005-2010).  The Flip Camera is a great, single purpose, pocket size camera.  It still works better than most mobile phone video recorders.  But Flip Cameras were trumped by a universally available, integrated, portable, multi-purpose device.

>Macs and PCs (forever!).  I don’t know anyone who loves their PC and Microsoft applications but I do have many friends who order Macs even before they are made available.  Nonetheless, the Wintel duo has consistently owned 90%+ of the desktop world for as long as anyone can remember. 

Even Apple, arguably the world's preeminent brand, has been unable to radically increase the adoption rate for Macs. Price, availability, software and accessory choice, massive distribution, and enterprise standardization have made it so that technically inferior Windows PCs outsell the Apple Mac by a ratio of twenty to one.

In my next post, I will explore the topic of how a startup with a breakthrough technology can go about establishing a leadership position within that technology category.