The Innovation Zone

It's Moving Time! Follow me.

It's time to retire this Blog site and move on to my new site at www.tkspeaks.com

Lots more to see and experience there so please jump on over. I'll be shutting down this site eventually as well and there will be no further posts to this site after this 1/14/2009.

For the webbies among you, I decided to go with WordPress, an open systems platform that really rocks!

2009 and still waiting?

During my undergrad years a group of my friends and I loved Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. We would discuss endlessly the many possible meanings of the two characters plight as they waited for a meeting with Godot, something that would never happen. The play appealed to us, in part, because we were all in that odd but blissful academic purgatory were we could stay sequestered from the real world as we waited for the promise of some wonderful and yet distant state of achievement, lurking just beyond our mind's reach.

I've been thinking alot about that play lately.

A new year is traditionally a time to look forward. A time of renewal. A clean slate to start fresh, make promises to ourselves about how we will do better and shed bad habits that hold us back. We welcome the New Year with the anticipation of a milestone achieved. Heck, it's not as though we did much more than survive another year, bust sometimes that is accomplishment enough. And as with most milestones, getting past it means we can say goodbye to all the crap we put up with in getting there.

So, you want to innovate? Check this out...

Silence is NOT a choice

When I was 15 I lived through a military coup-de-ta. For three days we all had to stay locked up in our homes watching a government owned TV channel broadcast the national anthem with intermittent breaks of propaganda. If anyone was caught outside after curfew in groups of three or more they could be shot on site, questions later.

Luckily it was a "bloodless" coup, at least so we were told. I heard otherwise from more than a few parents of university protesters whose children where overrun by tanks. But as far as coups go it was certainly among the least violent.

Even still, let me tell you, for a young American kid full of the arrogance of youth and more specifically that unique blend of American youth, it was an eye opener to see how quickly freedom could be taken away.

Three years later when I attained the privilege to vote I didn't walk to the polls, I ran. I've been doing so ever since. Sorry to be so sappy about this but I still get goosebumps when I fill in that little oval, pull the lever, or pop a chad! For me entering a voting booth is a near sacred experience.

A Crisis of Uncertainty

If I'm overdue for a posting it's only because like everyone else in the known universe I've been trying to keep myself as busy as possible to avoid coming up for air to read the headlines. It's a mess - no doubt about it but we are living through an era that will go down in history as a prime example of how we not only repeat the mistakes of the past but add to the magnitude of those mistakes each time we do. The question on everyone's lips is, of course, how did we get into this predicament? (Read on...)