So I’m hurrying to my plane back from SXSW and I hear my name called on the airport PA to come to security. Not a good feeling.

So I rush over to security and take out my passport.

Me: Hi, I’m Gil Reich, you called me

Them: Do you have any other ID?

Me: Yeah, I have a second passport …

Them: Anything else? Driver’s license? Credit cards?

Me: Sure, right here in my wallet.

Them: Where is your wallet?

Me: Right here in my pocket [except it isn't. I feel my other pocket. Not there either. I see them smiling.] It’s not in my pocket. It’s in your pocket, isn’t it? You have my wallet, that’s why you called me here. [I'm slow, but I get there eventually. Sometimes.]

One of them is holding my driver’s license, and he asks me for my birthday. Which was a little silly, as I just got through TSA using this passport that I’m holding, and my face matches the ID in his hand. But I don’t care, I’ll recite the entire contents of my wallet if he wants.

I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to go back to the store where I left my wallet and thank him for returning my wallet.

According to the receipt I have, it was Robin Jones.

So, Robin and wonderful TSA people who gave me back my wallet, thank you. And thank you nice people everywhere who do these things. A few minutes later I’d have been on a plane and eventually I’d have figured out that I was without all my money, credit cards, driver’s license, and whatever else. So thank you Robin, TSA, and other nice people. You rock.

Jim Joyce had just joined Denkinger, Bartman, Buckner, and Merkle in that special place in hell reserved for men whose momentary blunders denied others their historic baseball achievements. Armando Galarraga had suddenly and shockingly lost his spot as the 21st pitcher in Major League history to throw a perfect game.

Armando Galarraga

And then less than 24 hours later it was all reversed. No, better than reversed. The two gentlemen had suddenly become the center of the feel good story that touched the most cynical sports fans.

Galarraga started the turnaround by doing what almost nobody else would do after he seemed to complete the perfect game only to see the umpire blow the final call. He smiled. Then he went and retired the 28th hitter to get the last out.

Joyce was next. He apologized publicly and privately, walking up to Galarraga after the game. Players and umpires came out with statements saying nice things about Joyce.

And then the next day, the Tigers, their fans, Joyce, and Galarraga finished it off.

First GM played a part by delivering a little red Corvette to the Detroit pitcher on the field before the game, in recognition of his accomplishment and his sportsmanship.

Then, though offered the day off by baseball’s commissioner, Joyce showed up, and walked right into what could have been a Tigers’ den of fans booing him hysterically. Instead they cheered him. Galarraga walked the lineup card out to Joyce.

I’d like to say that this was my happiest moment as a sports fan but that would have to go to either the 2008 Super Bowl or the ’86 World Series. I’m not that evolved. But this sportsmanship moment involving teams I don’t care about and people I never heard of was up there.

To sum up the actions taken:

• Galarraga somehow reacting on the spot with grace and a smile, and returning to the mound to finish the game.
• Joyce issuing the perfect apologies, with no excuses. Immediate, emotional, in person, and in public.
• Players and umpires coming out of nowhere to express what a gentleman and a professional Joyce was in this long umpiring career.
• The Tigers manager and fans reacting with tremendous grace in accepting the apology and embracing the umpire.
• GM capitalizing on the moment to both generate and earn goodwill.

It was a Disney moment, but better. The pitcher didn’t get his perfect game, but something more. He’ll be remembered more than most of the guys who did throw perfect games.

Most of the press started out trying to fan the flames. But Joyce, Galarraga, and the fans provided them a better story in its place.

It was perfect reputation management, a perfect recovery. A perfect moment of humanity, of people acknowledging their fallibility and moving on. It was what sports is supposed to be. Thank you to all involved. You’ve earned your reputations.

2 central themes of Passover are:

• Liberation
• Compassion for others

Seder Plate

The liberation theme is dominant, and has been an inspiration to others, particularly in the anti-slavery movement in the United States.

The compassion theme plays out in several aspects, including:

• We open the Seder by inviting all who are hungry to join us. [Obviously today this invitation is largely symbolic, but IMO it strongly affects our attitudes].
• The Bible frequently tells us to be kind to the stranger, the orphan, and the widow and then reminds us that we were strangers in Egypt.
• Several traditions instruct us that our happiness is incomplete because of the Egyptians who suffered and died while we achieved our freedom. [Note that this isn't the same as being held responsible for that suffering].

IMO these complementary but sometimes competing themes are driving the two camps in the today’s health care debate. One side finds it unconscionable that there can be people without health care. Many on the other side are concerned with freedom both on the individual and on the national level. There’s a significant fear that the US is failing to be self sufficient and fiscally responsible and will be increasingly owned by China, Saudi Arabia, and others.

The same eternal themes continue to drive the development of individuals and societies. It is at times frustrating that the same stories can lead to opposite views on critical issues. But the US is in better shape than they sometimes realize. Americans agree on the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. America is the most charitable nation on Earth, and the first on the scene at disasters.

I’m proud to have been born in the United States and to be living in Israel.

I wish you all a Happy Passover, and may we all, from all nations and religions, spread the blessings of liberty and compassion.

No, this isn’t a spin on “Take my wife, please.”

Rena Reich

Today’s Answer of the Day informed me that it’s Ada Lovelace Day, the day to honor Ada Lovelace by pledging to post a tribute to a woman in technology today.

Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked with computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Men had already figured out how such machines could be used for math. Ada’s insights were in ideas of how such machines could be programmed for other applications such as composing music and creating graphics.

So I’d like to recognize Rena Reich today. She taught herself programming, wrote functions to integrate dictionaries and encylopedias into Answers.com,  and eventually founded her own wiki company, starting with The Pet Wiki. Doing some programming herself and working with others she put together a great site, and she shares her experiences and learnings on her blog.

Ada Lovelace didn’t invent the Analytic Engine, she figured out clever ways to apply it to enhance the human experience. That’s been Rena’s goal. I wish her continued success, and I wish all of you, especially the women developing and applying technology, a happy Ada Lovelace day.

Turning 40

I guess it’s appropriate that I work in the search industry, because as I turn 40 I’ve decided that the search is a big chunk of the meaning, and the beauty, of life.

I was an insufferable know-it-all when I was 20. I had life all figured out and had no patience for hypocrisy or timidity.

I was a big Tom Peters fan, Keep it Simple, Ready Fire Aim, etc. Just believe and don’t overthink and it will all work out.

My views of human nature, and of religion were also centered around a simpler world.

Things were naturally good and simple, and problems were avoidable. We were given a simple world and we just needed to keep things straight. Now I believe we were given a complicated world and a problematic nature, and that’s where all the fun begins. We didn’t start with a pure nature and a perfect world that we messed up. We were given love & hate, compassion & anger, humility & ego, and thrown into a messy world and told to make it work.

Some people find that depressing but I love it.

To be fair to the other side though, there’s plenty that the 20-year old me would love to remind the 40-year old me. Sure you need to provide financial security for your family, but don’t forget the joy of work. Don’t get so lost in the money that you forget the importance of serving people with great products and services. I made some dramatic decisions in my early 20s — moved to Israel, got married, had kids — and they worked out quite nicely. The challenge is for the older and wiser 40-year old me to maintain the courage and integrity that came more naturally when I was living in a simpler world.

So my birthday wish to myself: to live the next 40 years with the humility and patience that I’m still trying to gain, along with the enthusiasm, courage, and integrity that I hope I haven’t lost. And to love the search for meaning, for connection, for beauty, and for excellence.

I know Moses found inspiration in the desert but I didn’t think I would.

Vegas can be inspirational

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s keynote speech was the most inspirational keynote I’ve heard. He focused on:

1. Figure out what brings you happiness. Don’t start a business thinking about the money.
2. The main things that brings happiness are feelings of connectedness, meaning, and purpose.
3. Focus on bringing happiness to your employees and customers. He loves when Zappos is described as Happiness in a Box.
4. He sold his first company (to Microsoft) because in their rapid growth they had lost their company culture, and he stopped looking forward to coming to work. He was determined not to repeat that mistake with Zappos.
5. Zappos has 10 values that they use for decisions about hiring, firing, and everything in between. They include “create a little fun and weirdness” and “be humble.”

Bob Brisco’s keynote was very down to earth, and sometimes seemed like a rebuttal. Key points from his keynote and subsequent session:

1. Most brilliant, innovative, inspired and dedicated entrepreneurs fail.
2. “I’m amazed at how many people don’t think we look at profits when valuating companies.” I guess one of the things that differentiates the Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 is that traffic, growth, and awesomeness aren’t enough. As Brisco says, there’s too much unknown if you’re trying to think 20 years out. There needs to be a clear path to being very profitable in the 24-month period.
3. He did say that the 6^th “transcendental” feature of a great company was passionate leadership. But he made clear that this was in no way a replacement of the first five, which involved building a business based on building a unique, focused site with great content, community, and monetization.

Though Hsieh was far more inspiring, Brisco’s might have been the better keynote. When leaving Las Vegas I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Quick points from it and from Dennis Prager’s ‘Happiness is a Serious Problem’:

1. The expectations that we all be positive causes us to deny and ignore our real feelings and what they’re trying to tell us.
2. Paradoxically, it’s not at all clear that expecting good things makes us happier. The ideal is striving for success within the knowledge that failure is more common. (See In Defense of Negative Thinking)
3. The best thing to do is often nothing, and positive thinking leads us to IMO disastrous overreach in Iraq, Stimulus Packages, Health Care, etc. All noble endeavors but I think we’d have more success had we gone in with a more realistic view of how our actions could backfire.

I was glad to hear both Hsieh and Brisco. Between them they gave me a nice view from both sides. I then started reading Rick Smith’s ‘The Leap’ which helped put things together for me. He argues powerfully for making important changes, but for making them slowly, incrementally, carefully. He’s talking about career change, but the same applies for any strategic issue. Answers.com‘s worst changes were the dramatic huge leaps into new products and markets. Its best were ultimately as dramatic but more cautious and incremental.

I’m with Hsieh that we need to focus on happiness, meaning, and doing great things. I’m with Brisco, Rick Smith, Ehrenreich, and Prager that we need to be making our changes with care, discipline and conservative expectations.

Finally, Shabbat in the Young Israel of Las Vegas was more inspirational then I expected, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/http2007/ / CC BY 2.0

When new tools create new opportunities it’s important to think about:

1. The eternal truths of the underlying concept
2. How those truths are best applied using the current technologies

For example, take Social Media. It’s networking, or relationship building. The most fundamental rules of Networking are:

1. Give before you take.
2. When somebody does something for you, reciprocate.
3. Listen and understand before you interact.
4. Go out and connect.

Those are some essential rules of networking. They’ve been true for millenia. They’re true for everybody from high school kids to politicians.

After thinking through what networking is, you should listen to the people who have specific advice for today’s top tools. One of my favorites “find the people who can help you the most and ReTweet their most self-serving Tweets.” In theory maybe I could have derived that for myself, but it helps to listen to the people who have experience with the latest tools. Maybe I could figure out how to best use digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and friends. But I’m much better off starting with an understanding of the eternal principles and then talking to somebody with relevant experience to understand how those principles are best applied.

Another quick example is blogging. Lisa Barone, Michael Gray, and the New York Times all had good pieces about how many people thought blogging was this great new thing, where writers would no longer “toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry.” As if the medium would suddenly invalidate the first rules of writing, such as “Write things that interest people” and “To make money from advertising, show prominent ads to a targeted commercial audience.”

Or finally, SEO (search engine optimization). It’s a form of marketing, of bringing people to your product. Marketing 101 tells you to figure out what your potential customers are looking for. SEO tells you how to accomplish this through keyword research. Marketing 101 says get Word of Mouth referrals. SEO says get links. Same concept applied to the new medium.

There will always be people telling us that these new things are scams, that it’s all obvious. On the other extreme, we’ll have people telling us these new things completely rewrite the rules of the universe. Don’t get tempted by either argument. Respect and understand both the old knowledge passed down and the new insights of those who immersed in the latest tools and techniques.

My Cat, Recovering

On Sunday my cat returned home bleeding from just below the eye. My wife reached in and removed a small metal ball that thankfully hit the bone. Somebody had shot him with a BB gun.

I felt there were 2 different kinds of attitudes when we talked to people about this:

1. “OK, so somebody shot your cat with a BB gun. Stop whining.”
2. “Wow, who would do such a horrible thing?”

The BB pulled from Omer's face

The main good news is that the cat is OK.

The other good news is that while the local police officer we dealt with was of the first type, and completely uninterested in doing his job on the issue, the second one we dealt with was of the second type. And apparently BB guns have to be registered, and they’re going to test the guns of the people in the area and since we have the bullet, they can match it to the gun. So they’ll probably get the person. Don’t know what happens after that.

I think many of us think that the only thing stopping us from certain illegal activities (like killing local cats) is our own conscious (or laziness). But often we’re wrong when we think we can do actions anonymously.

As for who would do such a thing … I don’t think it’s the kind of person who is kept awake at night by cats and finally says “I have to do something.” Those kinds of people either do nothing or they call somebody responsible for dealing with the problem. They don’t actually get a BB gun (or poison or whatever) and kill the cats.

I think the person who shoots cats is a person with a lot of anger and need to hurt. And that shooting cats with a BB gun is more likely to increase the need to hurt than to satisfy it.

Regarding pet lovers vs. non pet-lovers, I guess I intermarried. I come from a family that wonders whether people’s love of pets comes at the expense of a love of people. My wife and mother-in-law love pets. They even started a great pet reference site. My view has changed, and I would say that loving animals generally increases the love a person has for people, not the opposite.

What do you think?

The book I picked up (Logic of Life by Tim Harford) on the way to SMX Advanced had a chapter on cities that somehow contained excellent insights into:

• Why I attended the conference
• Social Media (one of the conference’s key issues)
• WikiAnswers (one of the sites we’re trying to make even better)
• Living near Jerusalem
• American exceptionalism (a topic close to my heart)

Harford was analyzing cities, and whether they’d become more or less relevant with all the new ways people could connect. He started by claiming that cities benefit from a “knowledge spillover.” Basically accelerated interactions with so many people leads to a lot more knowledge transfers. And this is especially true for internet entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, etc.

So Tim asks, is physical proximity less important in our wired world?

And he convincingly answers no, it’s probably even more important. Virtual connections generally support rather than replace physical proximity.

Take the SMX Twitter feed. Read the real time chatter, click through to the excellent write-ups by brilliant writers like Lisa Barone, Brian Hancock, and me (thought I’d slip that in) … and you’d think there was no reason to attend physically.

And yet what you get from the non-attenders on the feed is not “Thanks for the great write-ups, saved me from having to attend,” but rather “I can’t believe I missed this, I’m definitely going next year.”

We’re people. We still crave the real contact. And reading the Twitter feeds and the blogs doesn’t replace that, it actually makes us feel the need for physical proximity with our community more acutely.

Now the complementary relationship can go both ways. Social Media sites can play the role of a virtual city, with knowledge transfers and sometimes even more importantly emotional support. Last year we had a get together with some of the top WikiAnswers supervisors. I learned that some of these people had really bonded online, even helping each other through personal crises. The WikiAnswers community was as real a support group for them as any physical meeting could be. In this case, I think occasionally physical meetings could be great to supplement the virtual ones, and our lead product manager and community leaders have been pushing for MeetUps, which I hope we’ll start having.

Next related riff: I live in a suburb of Jerusalem. The wired world lets me work in this industry despite being on a different continent than most of our community. And yet it still involves frequent trips to the U.S. And when too much time goes by without face-time between our offices, we notice tempers rising and misunderstandings multiplying. So how has the virtual world changed my life? Without it I’d probably only be part of the Jerusalem local economy. With it, I’m far more connected to the U.S.-centered economy, and therefore travel to NY far more often (I’m writing this from the airport). So the virtual world provided an opportunity that was previously only available in the physical world — but that opportunity then greatly increased my physical visits to New York.

Final riff: American exceptionalism. Once again, because so much of what America did can now be done in other countries, or by foreign nationals on U.S. soil, some people think that America, like cities, will decline. I think the opposite is true. The more the rest of the world benefits from and contributes to industries dominated by U.S. companies, their growth strengthens not only themselves but also the United States. The U.S., the world’s most receptive nation to immigrants, and to other people’s ideas and contributions, will continue to grow as others embrace America’s values. And make no mistake, no matter how much even “allies” condemn “America’s values” as cowboy consumerism, etc., they’ve still largely embraced the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness values where America still leads the way, no matter what its critics say. But that’s an issue for another post. For here let me just posit the parallel: just as the growth of virtual hubs makes the physical hubs (cities) even more important, the growth of countries devoted to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness will help America grow.

The other day I was surprised to hear my daughter singing Harry Chapin’s Dreams Go By, a song written by a guy who died about a dozen years before my daughter was born. Then I remembered that her mom put a bunch of our old CDs on my daughter’s iPod. We talked about the song a bit. Is it supposed to be sad? Happy? Background — it’s a couple picking up their grandkids while remembering all the dreams they let go by in their happy [I think] and productive lives.

Then we listened to more Harry Chapin, and I got to thinking about how values change across the generations. Chapin isn’t my generation either — the first I heard of him was being with my parents when they heard of his tragic death.

So I was thinking about some of his songs and how they reflect changing values:

• Cats in the Cradle: His best known song, still speaks to me, the most eloquent anthem to man’s need to be a complete father, despite his instincts to just be a provider. [Altough as my wife points out, the song is inaccurate. He complains at the end that his boy is just like him, which is untrue. One of the reason the son can't visit his father is because he's taking care of his sick son, so the son is a more involved father].
• Flowers are Red: Probably my favorite (not including silly songs like “Stop Singing These Sad Songs.”) A great anthem to creativity and non-conformity.
• Babysitter: When this song came on over the iPod speakers, I asked to move past it. The song is about the babysitter that made him a man. I guess he considered this free love to be another example of natural overcoming of artificial conservative restraints to be our true unrestricted selves. Today I think we’d call this molestation, or statutory rape.

Some passing thoughts:

• Technology can increase the generation gap, but it can also help bridge them
• The “progressive” values from 60s folk singers had some parts that the subsequent generations find powerful, and others that the subsequent generations find repulsive.
• Our best thoughts come when we recognize that the nature of life includes much tension and conflict, joy and sacrifice, celebration and compromise. The conflicts are natural, and our job is to deal with them happily and productively. Thoughts based on the mistaken idea that life is simple and we just need to let it flow can be dangerous, even bad.