…You’re coming, right?

15 January 2010 Update: After reading on Gawker and other sites that Yéle’s finances are less than squeaky, I’ve removed the link to their page. My apologies.

Watching the news unfold yesterday, I quickly heeded the call of Wyclef Jean and sent a financial donation to Yéle via text. I noticed others on Twitter recommending donations to the Red Cross, MercyCorps, Partners in Health and other organizations. Who to choose? Here is an alphabetical list, not meant to be comprehensive, of organizations currently mobilizing to bring help to Haiti. Most have donation buttons on their homepages. Please feel free to add more in the comments:

AmeriCares

This organization has been mobilizing emergency response efforts throughout the globe for over 25 years.

AmeriCares Website

From the site:

AmeriCares is preparing to respond to a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti earlier today. The earthquake leveled a hospital in the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince.

Official casualty reports are being developed, but witnesses near the disaster could hear screams of people trapped inside the hospital. AmeriCares is pledging $5 million for the people of Haiti.

ICRC – International Committee of the Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross is perhaps the best-known international provider of relief in times of disaster and emergencies.

ICRC Website

Money can also be donated by phone at 816-931-8400 or 800-RED-CROSS.

To donate $10 via text message, text HAITI to 90999.

From the site:

The ICRC has joined its Red Cross partners to support the earthquake victims of Haiti. It is mobilizing resources and staff to respond to the earthquake in which thousands of people are feared to have died.

Médecins sans Frontièrs / Doctors without Borders

MSF provides medical care to people in danger all over the world.

Médecins Sans Frontièrs Website

From the site:

First reports are now emerging from MSF’s teams who were already working on medical projects Haiti when an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale struck the country early January 12. MSF staff immediately started treating hundreds of people injured and have been setting up clinics in tents to replace their own damaged medical facilities.

MercyCorps International

Mercy Corps “is a team of 3700 professionals helping turn crisis into opportunity for millions around the world. By trade, we are engineers, financial analysts, drivers, community organizers, project managers, public health experts, administrators, social entrepreneurs and logisticians. In spirit, we are activists, optimists, innovators and proud partners of the people we serve.”

MercyCorps Website

From the site:

A major earthquake struck Haiti’s capital, collapsing buildings and disrupting communications. As the devastation comes into focus, Mercy Corps is deploying an emergency team.

Partners In Health

Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, PIH has been providing community-based medical treatment to the citizens of Haiti since 1983.

Partners in Health Website

From the site:

A major earthquake centered just 10 miles from Port-au-Prince has devastated sections of the city and knocked out telephone communications throughout the country.

In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, our clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

We are still in the midst of collecting information from all our sites in Haiti, and determining how we can best help with the recovery efforts in the areas hardest hit.

UNICEF

Unicef is a branch of the United Nations specifically devoted to assisting children worldwide.

Unicef Website

From the site:

In coordination with all other UN agencies present on the ground, UNICEF will provide supplies to allow access to adequate sanitation, safe water and basic health care.

UNICEF is also preparing materials and staff so that children, tremendously vulnerable during natural catastrophes, are protected.  UNICEF materials and advisors will assist so that children are able to continue learning and studying, and be provided safe recreation areas while their caretakers turn to rebuilding their lives.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog. While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

Getting back to mental maps, or mental models. You say mental model, and a lot of other people say mind mapping, and I wonder if there’s a difference in your view about those two things.

Digital Mind Map

Well, yeah. Mind mapping is a very technical term where you essentially brainstorm by putting an idea in the center, and sort of spiking out. I remember when I discovered mind mapping in college. I was doing a research project in India, and I discovered mind mapping, and all of a sudden my world opened up, because it’s more mapped into the network structure of the brain. But a model is just a representation of reality. So a mind map could be a representation underneath that, but mind maps are subsets of all models.

Mind maps don’t work for me, and I think that has to do with how I learn. But I wonder if you run into this also with mental models. Are there people who absorb that information better and worse? Are there people who find this more or less useful? What is the response to mental models?

I think there’s a whole variety of responses. My models occupy the simple but not simplistic spot. My models are bootstrapping you into your mental models, if you like, to be sort of self-referential. Because I don’t want to give you the whole answer. What I find is mavens are the most dubious about my models, because I reduce them down.

Elephant Carving

I remember this art project that I did in 8th grade. I had a block to carve. And I started carving, and I had this elephant. My elephant was just this blocky thing, because I was afraid to cut too much, because you couldn’t glue it back on. That’s where I feel people are with mental models. And I’m always, like, cut, cut, cut down to the bone, so I can get to the essence. So when I say people fall into one of three categories, maven, relater, evangelist, both the mavens and the relaters go “noooo, that can’t be right.” Evangelists are like, “sweet, that’s easy, that’s quick, I need a quick model I can use,” so they’re good. Mavens are like, “that can’t be right. Really?” Because they look at people as mysterious.

And relaters like me say “but I’m all those things”

Exactly.

Because they relate.

Exactly. And “oh, people are so varied.” That’s where I get the resistance. Bootstrap, you get resistance from the other two sides. The cookie cutters go, “well, I want control over this, I’m not going to let it just go out.” And, “I need a business plan,” and stuff like that. And the funding-driven guys go, you know, “what are you talking about? I’m the master of the universe. I know what’s gonna happen, so why am i gonna let the process deliver?”

But you’re not creating the model for them.

Right.

So that’s okay.

It is, you’re right. That’s the subtlety of why I go slow with all this stuff, because I don’t want people to take my models and make them their reality. I want them to say, this is just showing up here. You asked about Bootstrap Austin. It started because I was even more convinced after my tech start-up deal, where I had raised half a million dollars from friends and family, spent it all, and found myself with nothing to show for it, going why didn’t I trust myself? I’m a bootstrapper, I knew about bootstrapping. I didn’t know the whole model. But I started with it back at Stanford.

I knew that was my path, not the Silicon Valley dominant path. What’s the founding company of Stanford? HP. Bootstrap. Scott Cooke came and spoke, the founder of Quicken. Bootstrap. Oracle: bootstrap. And yet I had allowed myself to go away from my own intuition. So I was talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, and they wanted to get funding. This was 2002, 2003. And I said “dude, you want to bootstrap your company. You want control,” and so on and so forth. I was having all these lunches, coffees, and dinners, and it started to get to be a real pain. So I thought, I’ll get these people together, I’ll introduce them to each other, and that’s how Bootstrap Austin was born.

Bijoy, thanks for your time today, and good luck with SXSW and your upcoming projects!

Thank you.

This is Part IV of a four-part series. Part I can be found here.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog. While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

Tell me a little bit about Bootstrap Austin and your involvement with it.

I inadvertently stumbled into another model, which is bootstrapping. I would say bootstrap is the third way of entrepreneurship. So when we think about entrepreneurship, we think of it as one activity, and it’s not. It’s an infinite set of activities. I like to break thing out into three, if you hadn’t noticed! I think of the cookie cutter entrepreneurs, the funding-driven entrepreneurs, and the bootstrap entrepreneurs. Cookie cutters are anything from franchises to any business whose business model is already known. Doctors, lawyers…

Widget sellers…

Widget sellers. Someone else has already discovered the business model, and now you’re making one of your own, but you’re not making anything new. The new seems to always come from Silicon Valley, where you throw money at it, and you IPO it, and all that. But it turns out that bootstrapping is really the way that built-to-last companies get built. Microsoft, HP, Oracle, even Google…

So what is bootstrapping? What does that mean?

It means a lot of things. The simplest way I think of it as, from a business model point of view, is that the business model emerges from the process of bootstrapping.

And the process of bootstrapping is…

Is right action, right time. It’s demo/sell/build. It’s constraint creates innovation. It’s use everything. It’s most described by a story about Baron Munchhausen. He supposedly found himself in a swamp. He’s drowning in the swamp, yelling for help, trying to get out of the swamp, no one’s there to help him. So he said well, I’m either going to be dead, or I’m able to get out. What am I going to do? I can’t get any help.

He looks around and sees his bootstraps, and pulls himself up by his bootstraps, and gets out of the swamp. There’s a competing myth which is that he pulled himself out by his hair, but “hairstrap” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. So bootstrapping is that story. Wherever you are you can make progress. You can create something out of nothing. And what happens with people, is we often fall into “well, I don’t have what I need, I need to do this big thing so I need to go get resources from an externa sourcel.” That’s why I think of it as right action, right time. You are essentially letting something unfold and evolve and emerge, and you’re the shepherd of that emergence, you’re not the author or the controlling entrepreneur.

So it lends itself more to collaboration.

It does. It is fundamentally a co-creative process. You’re co-creating your venture with your partners, with your customers, with the world. You’re on this journey of diminishing yourself into the right spot, and you’re watching what’s happening, and as you get better at watching, you make progress.

So we have this model, this map that we built, and it talks about the different elements that keep showing up. Each stage is nothing more than the birth of an element. So the “You” stage, the first stage, is the birth of you. What are your unique talents, what are your unique passions, what are you good at – your MRE!.

Once you start figuring that out, then you get into the “QUEST(ion)” stage, where it’s like “Oh my gosh, do I want to go on this hero’s journey?” This is Joseph Campbell and all of that. Because many people are called, few take the action. That means that you’re going to go on this journey away from what society tells you you’re supposed to do.

And if you say yes to that, then you enter into the “Ideation” phase. What are you going to do? That’s the birth of your “it.” Your product, service, experience, cause,  community – whatever it is that you’re going to make. And then once you do that, you enter the valley of death. And then you’re on the hunt for this customer. You’re like, oh my gosh, someone please pay me for what I’m doing so I can be sustainable.

The Hero's Journey

But all these elements keep going. The You still keeps going, the Inner Journey keeps going, the Product Journey keeps going, and the job of us as the entrepreneur is to weave them and integrate them together, so with the addition of a new element, kind of like a fugue, the addition of a new element doesn’t disrupt, but it forces and harmonizes with the previous elements.

I see this mental map as an animation. I mean, I imagine that it would be really useful to people. If mental mapping is about visualizing the process, or an idea, this is a particularly fluid process, as you describe it, as a fugue, as music. I wonder if you’ve ever thought about animating your mental maps.

I haven’t, but I’ve done some half-assed attempts in Power Point to show the elements coming in. But again I need my power of two on that!

Well I’m not the one to help you I’m afraid!

Thank you for illuminating a gap in my power of two (laughs). And not helping me at all.

You’re so welcome! As a relater maybe I can find somebody for you.

There you go.

This is Part III of a four-part series. Part I can be found here. Part IV is here.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.

While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

You were talking about dance partners earlier. I’m assuming those people were often relaters.

dance partners

Or mavens. Yes, exactly. They were the complementary energy. Evangelists tended to be more of my friends, but we weren’t getting anything done because we were stepping all over each other. Whereas a Maven or a Relater, and more often Mavens, because their strength was my minor, I could relate to them. But it wasn’t my deal, my core thing. One of my favorite examples is we had a teacher who was having us do Shakespeare creative projects. It was the morning it was due, and we’re waiting in front of the class for it to start, and I go, “I know, I’ll do a one-man King Lear!” So I’m writing it, I start Act I, I’m busily working on this thing, and my tall friend Jon Barden walks up to me, he says “Hey, Bijoy.” And I’m like “yeah Jon,” kind of, ‘can’t you see I’m busy?’”

Doing your one-man King Lear…

He goes, “What are you doing for your creative project?” I go, “I’m doing a one-man King Lear!” He goes, “Wanna make it a two-man?” And I looked up and went, “Oh my god! Totally!” And we blew this thing out, it was the most hilarious project that I’d done, we ended up performing it at the theater in the school. The funny part was years later, I did a short play called Mystic Cab. Same thing. I decided to do a one-man, one act play. This was like five years ago. And I had been working on this thing and it was a total mess. I’m driving downtown and my friend Kert calls me and he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m working on this thing, I signed up for Frontera Fest. I’m so screwed because five days from now I’m gonna have to present something, do 25 minutes of a play, and I’ve got nothing.” And he says, “I’ll do it with you.” And I said “Oh my god, that would be so great!” And then I thought, why didn’t I think to ask him? Because he had some free time, he’s a theater guy and we’re good friends. Right?

So now, have you learned? I mean now do you reach out?

Now, after 17 bonks on the head from the universe? (laughter). Yeah, I look at all my projects as collaborations now. And I think “who’s my dance partner, or dance partners?” within anything that I’m doing. The book I wrote was written with Dave Wolpert. The film version of Mystic Cab was with Nils Juul-Hansen. Bootstrap Austin is one big collaboration. And I constantly go okay, my job is to reduce down into my thing and to create the space for others.

Now, one interesting caveat: I have a strong minor energy. Some people are very much on the points of the triangle. They’re like hard core mavens, hard core relater, hard core evangelist. Some of us are major-minors. We have a strong minor. Then we’ve got to reconcile within ourselves how those two integrate and don’t kill each other. I’ve had another journey, where I was essentially outsourcing my maven to other people, and my internal maven was kind of peeved. Like, “hello dude, I’m here, I’m a maven.” And when the evangelist essentially took people off a cliff with my tech start-up, the maven said, “look, go in the corner, I’m gonna show you what’s up.” And in a sense these last number of years have been a maven exercise. My maven energy has been dominant in terms of building these models. And he showed my evangelist energy, “guess what, that’s my contribution. Yeah there’s these great mavens and relaters, and maybe even other evangelists that we want to partner with, but what you need to evangelize are these models. These are the creations that I’m coming up with, so now let’s work together.” So that’s another interesting self-reconciliation.

I find the choice of maven interesting, because I guess in my head there’s a little bit of a disconnect. I think of a maven as a proselytizer. But you think of a maven as a learner? or as a thinker?

An expert, yes.

An expert. Alright.

I mean these are just words, so you end up having to pick some word.

I’m just trying to understand the model a little bit better. And I think I do, but we have jumped so into it that I want to clarify it at this point. An evangelist is definitely your proselytizer, that’s definitely the person who is the leader, brings people together…

"Bono, not the Edge"

Bono, not The Edge. You know, The Edge is the maven, Bono is the evangelist. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. You see these pairs.

And the relater? Where does the relater fit in? The relater feels like a third wheel to me, in your model. And that’s because you’re probably describing yourself that way.

That’s where I’m sitting, yeah. I live in that region of the world. The relater is the glue. The relater is, if we have the human fabric as the title of the book, the relater is the weaver of the human fabric. What they do is, mavens pick an area of the world and study it. Relaters pick people. For relaters, people are the thing. And people are this infinite puzzle, and they’re just so interested in people. Oh my gosh, your journey, and how’s your day, and all this stuff. What they’re gathering data on is this entity called a person; and where they are; and then you should really talk to this person. My youngest brother is a total relater. and I have these great relaters in my world, and I look at what they do, and it’s incredible. It’s sometimes really frustrating, because as a maven or an evangelist you don’t think of a person as a universe unto themselves. but a relater does. So they’ll sit there and if you say, tell me about Joe, they’ll go oh, you know, and 20 minutes later you’ve got a soliloquy on Joe. And I’m like no, don’t tell me that much. What they’re doing, and this is the interesting thing, is I always used to draw the triangle as maven, evangelist, relater, like that…

Maven at the top.

Maven at the top. I didn’t know why. But I learned later that a model is already communicating information when you place the elements. So my friend Tina, who did the book cover, she has a company called Spoon Bend, it’s a graphic design marketing company. She took the triangle and she tipped it. and she also did three paintings that illustrated the energies of these three. she tipped it forward, and all of a sudden it all made sense. because the evangelist was on the ground, pulling the triangle. the maven was stepping up on the top. and the relater was in the back, connecting, making sure everything is good, but taking a quiet role. That’s the thing with relaters is you can tell who the mavens are, you can definitely tell who the evangelists are, the relaters are in the background. they’re the unseen third. But really each of these two resolves the duality for the other. So when the maven and the relater have a conflict, the evangelist can come in there and broker that discussion; because all of their energies are in a tight triangle like that – so, relaters are incredibly important.

Societies also fall into the triangle. Think of America: Evangelist/Maven. Right? I mean our dominant is we’re evangelists out here, we’re the Wild West, those are our heroes. Relaters don’t get much play here. Whereas in Japan, that’s a Relater/Maven culture. What’s Japan all about? It’s how you treat each other, how you interact. Whenever you’re looking for a culture’s energy, look at what they formalize. Germany: mavens. Uber-mavens.

You mentioned Hong Kong. Did you grow up in Hong Kong?

Yeah.

So how would you describe Hong Kong?

Hong Kong at night

Oh, Evangelist. Very clearly. Which is interesting. Hong Kong and Singapore have an interesting relationship, because Singapore to me is maven, Hong Kong is very evangelist, and I always thought the obvious thing for them was to hook up and start, you know, getting all the business people in Hong Kong talking to the inventors and technologists in Singapore. That would be my economic prescription.

This is Part II of a four-part series. Here’s Part III.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Flickr Image by aditza121

So I’m totally addicted to the Printable CEO Time Management sheets by David Seah, which I rediscovered this week. One of the suggested methods is to set a timer every 15 minutes. When it goes off, you make a note of what you’ve been doing during that time period. It helps keep me on track, and it also brings awareness as to where my distractions are (hello, RSS!)

Flickr Image by tanakawho

The question then became: what to use to time myself? I have a few options – I can use my iPhone, which has a nice timer built into the clock. I can use the oven clock, but that would require heading to the kitchen to reset it every 15 minutes – not very efficient. Or, I could use a Mac widget, and set a timer in my dashboard. I don’t actually own a physical egg timer.

I decided to start with a widget. I did a little search and found a couple candidates. One, called 3-2-1, you can set for 15 minutes and then it silently pops into the foreground. This is fine if I happen to be at my computer, but what if I’m doing dishes or watering the lawn? Without a chime to alert me, I wouldn’t know the 15 minutes were up. The next one I tried was the Meditation Timer Widget. This is designed, obviously, for meditating, but the pleasant chime at the beginning and end of the 15 minutes appealed to me. The tendency to fail, however, did not. Twice yesterday I set it but it failed to go off after 15 minutes. Today, it just flat out refused to work.

I have to confess, here: I don’t really get the Mac Dashboard. The only widgets I currently have activated are the clock, the calendar, the dictionary, airline tracker, and the calculator. I don’t even know why the clock and calendar are activated, I never look at them. I can see what time it is by glancing at the upper right-hand corner of my screen. To see the widget, I’d have to click on the Dashboard icon, or press F4. I know what day it is, and for any calendar planning I go straight to Google Calendar. The Dictionary widget is great, but I use it rarely. The web provides plenty of substitutes, with richer abilities to drill down into meanings and synonyms. As for the airline tracker and the calculator, these have been completely replaced by iPhone apps.

Flickr image by Robert S. Donovan

And the iPhone is where I’ve turned, now, for my timer needs; indeed, it’s where I’ve turned for all my “widgets”. Track an airline? There’s an app for that. Look up a word or its synonyms? You bet. Need a flower pot? Okay, I don’t know about that one. Probably there’s an app for that, but I’d rather just look out the window.

This blog post inspired by Twitter:

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