Changing Gears

Having reached a good outcome with CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell’s transition to RichRelevance, I will be taking this opportunity to switch gears: I am going into independent-consultant mode. That will include remaining on the RichRelevance team in a consulting capacity. I will be working with a few other consulting clients as well. I will also be using the flexibility of consulting to reserve some time for myself.

I realize that some people say they’re doing consulting as a euphemism for looking for a job. To be clear about my situation, consulting is currently what I want my job to be. Having been deep into a single thing for five years, with very high-stakes customers, I’m ready to come up for air. And if I’m coming up for air, I might as well breathe deeply. ;)

I’m fortunate to have clients right out of the gate, but I am always happy to hear of interesting opportunities where a little bit of my expertise and abilities can have significant impact. The areas I’m covering are product design, product marketing, strategy, company evaluations for M&A and venture capital, and advising middle- to later-stage startups on internal innovation for “next act” products (those that come after the core product that the entire company has been built around).

Feel free to drop me a line if there’s a connection or discussion to be had.

CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell @ RichRelevance

Six months ago, CNET Content Solutions announced a strategic partnership with RichRelevance regarding Intelligent Cross-Sell, the product I co-created and the team I led at CNET. This blog post by RichRelevance’s CEO, David Selinger, describes what Intelligent Cross-Sell does and how it adds value to RichRelevance’s product line.

Other than posting a link to the CNET-RichRelevance announcement on Twitter, I didn’t say much about the deal when it was announced. My feeling was, I’ll talk about it when we’ve accomplished something more than announcing the partnership. Now is the time.

Having spent six months working closely with RichRelevance, I am pleased with the result: 100% of the customers are transitioned, the technology is migrated, the ICS team is at RichRelevance, and we’ve already done deals for new customers as part of RichRelevance. Meanwhile, CNET Content Solutions continues to bring product data, industry expertise, and sales support to the partnership. It’s a win/win as both sides now benefit from a bigger Intelligent Cross-Sell business than would have been possible from CNET alone.

In the next post, I’ll say what this means for me going forward.

My Perestroika

My Perestroika is a documentary film about the lives of five Russians. They were children of the Soviet Union, which fell down as they grew up.

Now middle-aged, some have ridden the waves of change; others have treaded water. The film splices their present-day selves with their home-movie pasts with their uncertain futures.

I thought it was superb, but you can judge the trailer for yourself:

Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World

Call it coincidence, but as I was writing about em dashes and long sentences lately, I was reading Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World. If you like long, lyrical sentences, festooned with em dashes, read on.

The geology of the northern half of California—whether we are talking about San Francisco Bay or the Central Valley, the Coast Range or the Sierra, the Monterey headlands or the cost of Humboldt country or Mount Diablo itself—is all interlinked, subtly confusingly and, for the geological mapmakers, often maddeningly. These links go far beyond the borders of the state—political lines that pay no heed, in this case, to the absolutes of geology. They spread far, far beyond—as we shall discover, they reach up to Alaska, they percolate across to Wyoming and Montana, they reach back west across two oceans as far, in fact, as India and Australia. One might say, indeed, that the story of what makes California so complex and so interesting and so dangerous—and what makes Diablo so similarly geologically alluring—has implications for, and connections to, the planet in its entirety.

It’s a marathon of a paragraph, but I like its layered, controlled complexity. Yet taken too far, that style can delineate itself to death:

[The basalts] spilled over and laid themselves down on the old Pangaea-Columbia-Arctica-Ur granitelike continental rocks that exist underneath, making the confection of geology that—in juxtaposition with all the ice and snow of climate and the storms and winds of weather, the polar bears and lichens of biology and the Eskimo and Inuit and Danes and Americans soldiers of anthropology—constitutes the great and mysterious island known today as Greenland.

The good news is, that specimen is the exception, not the rule. Winchester’s long and winding sentences are usually a pleasure to parse. Like poetry, they require more of you, but they reward the effort.

The same can be said of A Crack in the Edge of the World’s subject matter. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake is the center of a narrative constellation that includes a roadtrip across North American geologic points of interest, a people’s-eye history of California from Gold Rush to early twentieth century, a seminar on geologic science, and ruminations about the fragility of human existence versus nature. Consult the 27-page index for other topics covered.

Put another way, if books were beer, A Crack in the Edge of the World would be an earthy, flavorful stout: gaggingly thick for some people, satisfyingly rich for others. I found myself in the latter camp.

Friends and Strangers

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I’ve been thinking about two stories. First, there was Abe Zelmanowitz, a worker at the World Trade Center. His co-worker and best friend, Ed Beyea, was a quadriplegic. As the building burned and people streamed down the stairwells, Abe stayed with Ed on the 27th floor landing. Because Ed weighed nearly 300 pounds, they were waiting for a rescue team to safely carry him.

Ed had a health aide, Irma, in the building. Although she found the two men, Irma was having trouble breathing from the smoke. Abe told her to go, that he would stay with Ed.

Both men called their families to say they were okay. Abe’s mother pleaded with him to get out while he could. He stayed.

Abe and Ed died in the building that day.

A family member recalled of the two, “If Ed was going to make [dinner] arrangements, he’d make sure it was kosher, and if Abe was going to make the arrangements, he’d make sure it was wheelchair-accessible. They always had each other’s best interests at heart.”

The second story is about Mike Benfante, who was also working in the World Trade Center. During the evacuation, he found wheelchair-bound Tina Hansen. He was a stranger to her, but Mike and colleague John Cerqueira carried Tina down 68 flights of stairs, often in darkness and smoke, sloshing through areas flooded by building sprinklers. It took 90 minutes. The building collapsed five minutes after they got out.

As the tenth anniversary of that day approached, Mike deflected attention from his heroism to the larger lesson of what 9/11 summoned in friends and strangers alike: “I’ve learned that 9/11 showed us that there are enormous, untapped reservoirs of extraordinary human kindness and generosity just waiting for a trigger, that this trigger should be pulled daily as most of us are basically good people.”