Huang Family Newsletter, September 2009

Quite a month for the Huangs:

* We started it off by spending a relaxing week in Ocean City with Amy's parents, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew.

* Lee went immediately from there to San Jose to see his parents. (They're recovering nicely and are prepping themselves, from a care and housing standpoint, for my mom's return home.)

* The day after Lee returned, he attended a one-day leadership conference in Philadelphia.

* The day after that, we headed to Whiting for the weekend for a church retreat.

* Jada started at her new school the next day.

* The next weekend, the kids got a day trip to Easton and the Crayola Factory.

* The next week, Amy started her clinical rotation in the Philadelphia prisons.

Whew! Thankfully, there was just enough time in all of that to decompress from it all, whether by taking leisurely walks through the Penn campus, sneaking in some much-needed weekend afternoon naps, petting the stray cat that made its home on our front porch for a couple of weeks, or eating smiley-face pancakes at the neighborhood diner.

Every Drop Counts

What would you think of an organization that, when faced with trying to figure out how to do the one thing it has been tasked to do, is responding with a $1.6 billion plan to do less of it? Crazy? Lazy? In the case of the Philadelphia Water Department, I say, “Bravo!”

The old school understanding of a municipal water department is to take rainwater and treat and store it so it can be used for drinking, bathing, cleaning, and watering. But those different uses require fundamentally different levels of treatment; so what if the smarter, greener, cheaper thing to do is siphon off the rainwater that doesn’t need to be treated as much or at all, and get that portion directly to those end uses? After all, as a colleague of mine once vividly put it, “I don’t get why we treat water enough to make it drinkable and then use it to flush our toilets.”

Hence, the Water Department’s ambitious effort to capture rainwater earlier, in the form of rain gardens and green roofs and porous pavement, rather than having it all spill into its often over-flooded sewers. Greenies here and around the country are holding their breath to see if it can advance this effort from a regulatory standpoint, and to see how it all plays out. If this works, thus defining economic and environmental viability circa 2050 by how well a city minimizes its use of fossil fuels pumped from the ground and maximizes its use of water falling from the sky, then you have to like Philadelphia’s chances as a location of choice.

Mickey D's in the USA

If you needed any more visualization of how much denser the US is east of the Mississippi than west, check out the distribution of McDonald's restaurants in the lower 48 at http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/. The moral of the story is that if you're prone to Big Mac attacks, don't find yourself at N 45.45955 W 101.91356 in South Dakota: it's 145 miles to the nearest Golden Arches.

PS Speaking of retail juggernauts, here's a very cool map of Walmart openings in the lower 48. I love how the store openings are depicted as toxic green bubbles popping up all over the place. This depiction really highlights how Walmart went absolutely nuts in the mid-80's and again in the mid-90's.

Making a Difference

Big ups to my friend and Fels classmate Frank Igwe, for a successful start to his CityACES' 2009-2010 schedule. First stop: Philadelphia. Featured guest: Michael Vick. Needless to say, this was a big deal. Or, as one grateful school administrator wrote to Frank after the event: "Today made me remember why I became an educator." Read more here: "Philadelphia Reflections," and click here if you can make a financial contribution.

In His Hands

I had a chance to talk and pray with my pastor earlier this week. We had arranged to meet to talk church business, but had plenty of personal items to catch up on, what with 7+ years having passed since he was last in our congregation, his family having just moved back from Bolivia, and my family having so many things going on. We talked and prayed a lot about our children, and while his are all teens or pre-teens, and mine are both much younger, we were coming from the same place, in terms of our love for them, and desire for God’s hand to be involved in their lives.

As we lifted each others’ children up to God in prayer, I had a fleeting pang of panic. I love my kids so much, and am aware of so many threats and dangers they now face and will continue to face as they grow older. Their preciousness to me heightens my worry over them being susceptible to so many hurts.

Indeed, at a very real level, my kids, my pastor’s kids, all kids are worryingly vulnerable. Physical ailments, emotional wounds, sexual predators, the relentless lies and corruptions of our society are like waves of danger threatening to wash over the youngest among us. It is enough to make a parent prayerful; enough even to make him or her continue to worry, even after praying.

Yet, on another level, we who have metaphorically and literally dedicated our kids into God’s care can know that they are perfectly protected. I am not so naïve as to think that just because a kid’s parents are Christian and pray for them, they are somehow immune to the terminal illnesses, mental health breakdowns, physical abuse, and other harms that afflict our children. To be in God’s hands does not preclude that we are wounded, in some cases irreparably or fatally.

God is a Father, and He did not spare His own Son from affliction, humiliation, and death. He had a purpose in those sufferings, and I have seen with my own eyes how childhood wounds can be redeemed for a glorious purpose. When I pray for my kids or anyone else’s, I do hope God will shelter them from harm on this side of glory. But I am also praying for a vastly deeper form of protection, to a Father who exalted His bruised Son, and in doing so loved all of us His children.

Love Hurts

There’s a catch little ditty making the rounds on Top 40 radio called “Knock You Down,” by Keri Hilson. If you hear her chorus once, you’ll have it ringing in your ears for the rest of the day:

Sometimes love comes around and it knocks you down

Just get back up when it knocks you down

Not surprisingly, she is speaking of romantic love. But, since the song has been ringing in my ears, I have not been able to help but contemplate if perhaps those words are true, if applied to a deeper kind of love.

It may seem clichéd, but love does hurt. If you truly love someone – whether a spouse, a child, a parent, or a friend – you expose yourself to all kinds of hurt. If they suffer, you suffer. If they hurt you, it hurts all the more because it came from someone you love. The ache of missing someone who is away from you is a very real hurt.

And, if we take this love thing really seriously, we become even more vulnerable to being hurt. We don’t run from people who are really hard to love, or whose hurts are more than we think we can bear. We don’t numb ourselves from the messy and difficult things in our own lives or in that of our loved ones, but deal with the hurt head-on, letting it crash over us like a mighty wave.

In other words, love is quite contrary to our self-preserving instinct. The world is full of people who once loved, but once they got hurt, stopped loving; and I can’t say that I blame them for not wanting to put themselves out there again. Love hurts; and, once hurt, it can make a lot of sense to not want to get hurt again.

And yet, are we not as humans hard-wired to love and be loved? As dangerous as love may be, is not closing oneself off to loving and being loved a far more miserable plight?

To couch this concept in spiritual terms, Jesus once said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it.” Ours is a life of love; and if you believe that living a life of love is all teddy bears and candy hearts, you don’t live in my house, my neighborhood, my city, or my generation. It can be tempting to save yourself the grief of loving and being loved, and love can sometimes seem like losing your life. But we can cling to a promise made by One who keeps His promises: if you lose your life for My sake and the sake of my message, you’ll save it.

Which is why I believe my brain has latched on to Ms. Hilson’s catchy little hook. Sometimes love does in fact come around and knock us down. And when it does, I hope that that second line of the chorus is not far from my mind: that I am encouraged to just get back up to love some more. For it is clear that, though it is fraught with the potential to be hurt, this way is the way to life.

Can Christians Be Capitalists

The American Enterprise Institute provocatively asks, "Can Christians Be Capitalists," in an upcoming forum in Washington later this month. Alas, I will not be able to attend; but I can chime in with my answer: "YES!"

To be sure, capitalism is by no means bullet-proof: it can lead to or impel the greed, gluttony, and deceit that left-wingers love to hate. I'm not so sure, though, that its political or economic opposites are any more or less prone to being used for evil. Is not capitalism, like money itself, simply a neutral tool, its users on the hook for praise or judgment?

One may argue, though, that, at its core, capitalism is about more more more, the unbridled pursuit of maximum profit above all else. Again, this may be an unfair indictment of capitalism on the basis of a minority of its most nefarious proponents.

Furthermore, consider what gains result from deploying assets, whether labor or capital, to their highest and best use. Once upon a time, a large chunk of our jobs and our money were devoted to agriculture and manufacturing. Advances in human ingenuity and physical technology have rendered these necessary tasks much easier to accomplish, freeing us up for other pursuits. Anti-capitalists may bemoan the loss of jobs in symbolically important industries, but very few would argue that we would be better off if 100 percent of us had to do back-breaking labor to coax enough food out of our plot of land to feed our family, or that we should get around by horse, carriage, and steamship.

Might it be that capitalism, if rendered properly, could be the gateway to lifting hundreds of millions of people from desperate poverty? Could the mechanism of capitalism translate into medical and agricultural breakthroughs that we cannot even fathom today, but that greatly enhance our ability to feed and care for what will be a global population of 9 billion by 2050? Would the good intentions of our left-leaning leaders instead shackle an economic system from achieving these kinds of outcomes that Christians ought to universally hope for?

To be sure, while Christians can be capitalists, they ought to be a certain kind of capitalist. Given our marching orders and our life purposes, our approach and tools should look fundamentally different than the world's. But just because we may have different metrics for success - we want to maximize gain for the poorest among us, we want to minimize global human suffering - does not mean we cannot use the same means and mechanisms to achieve them.

This is, of course, just my opinion. Let's hope for a balanced discussion in Washington later this month, one in which capitalism isn't dismissed out of hand by good-hearted Christians as worldly and evil, or defended by equally good-hearted Christians who are resigned to accept its flaws and not challenge it and its proponents to a more enlightened use of it.

[Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the link.]

What I Learned From My Earlier Jobs

Since graduating from college, I’ve only held two jobs, which is far fewer than most of my peers, many of whom flit in and out every year or two. Changing your place of employment on an annual basis is far too much transition for me, and I have high workplace satisfaction, so I harbor no envy. But one benefit of having lots of different employment stints is that each adds something to your perspective and skill set.

As I have reflected on this, it occurs to me that while I’ve only held two jobs in my adult life, my high school and college jobs have helped build my own professional foundation, in terms of lessons learned that can then be applied to future employment situations. What follows, then, is a cataloguing of those earlier jobs, and of what I took from them.

• Summer 1989 – Sears. My first real job; oh, how grown-up I felt to go to the bank on Friday to deposit my paycheck! I worked in the catalog department, as back then people had the option of picking something out and then picking it up and paying for it in our department. Everyone should have a job like this, where you learn customer service, how to work a cash register, and how to not be affected by an irrational and unsatisfiable customer who is hell-bent on making your life miserable. One other weird memory was our automated phone service, which would call customers to let them know their order had arrived. I always got a chuckle when the phone service would call a customer and get one of those new-fangled answering machines: so one machine would pick up the phone, and one would leave a message. (This seemed funnier to me when I was 16 in 1989 than it does today.)

• Summer 1990 - Samirian Enterprises. I had just learned how to use a primitive version of Microsoft Excel, so a family friend hired me to create a spreadsheet for his import-export business. Creating spreadsheets is matter-of-fact to me today, and I’m realizing now that it is that way in part because of this early experience. I made five dollars an hour, and I remember looking at the clock on my desk and saying to myself, “Another twelve minutes, another dollar.”

• Summer 1991 – Measurex. The summer between high school and college, my dad helped me get a job in the finance department of where he worked. Some more spreadsheet work, plus my big project that year was doing this headquarters-wide square footage allocation exercise. Unbelievably, I had to do almost the exact same task a decade later at The Enterprise Center; who would’ve thunk it at the time? I also remember falling asleep in a meeting with my boss; hey, meetings after lunch were brutal for me back then.

• Summer 1992 – City Team Ministries. I spent most of the summer in Taiwan, and also did another short stint at Samirian. But I also squeezed in some volunteer work at City Team Ministries, which ran a coffee house for homeless people in downtown San Jose. Having just participated in a Spring Break evangelism project in Daytona Beach, this was a natural way for me to continue in that kind of work. On another note, I have thought often of how formative this experience was for me in terms of view of cities and regions: consider that my morning commute to the coffee house took me from an upper-middle class suburban neighborhood through a booming downtown area and into an adjacent run-down inner city part of town.

• Summer 1993 - Dean Witter. I worked for two stockbrokers who managed money for individuals and pension funds. In addition to having fundamental investment credos seared into my head (“diversify,” “stocks for the long run,” etc.), and deciding the macho stock market workplace wasn’t for me (I’m blushing even now as I think about the stories I heard), I took awawy two valuable experiences from this summer. First, I learned how to organize a mass mailer: they sent a 3,000-piece mailer to pension managers in the region every couple of months. Second, I learned not to be afraid of cold-calling: they had me and two other interns cold-call as many of those 3,000 managers as we could over the course of that summer.

• Summer 1994 - Bain Link. The summer before one’s senior year, back then, was a defining one for Whartonites, as whatever internship you landed was often where you landed post-graduation. I took a less conventional route, spending the summer in Eastern Europe doing Christian missions work. But one of the main vehicles for getting out there was an internship in Moscow with a joint venture between Bain & Company, the vaunted management consulting firm, and a Russian consulting firm. The summer away from the US blew me away. I think every American that can should do something like this: as globally minded as I thought I was before this trip, I realized I fundamentally saw America as the center of the world, and being somewhere else for an extended period gave me a better perspective on the world. Now that I am a consultant, I can also tie back principles I employ now that I clunkily developed back then: cataloguing raw data, having a project timeline, tying it all together in the end.

Looking back on all of these jobs all together, I’m glad I did what I did. My jobs speak of a level of privilege, in terms of what contacts I was able to trade on to get them in the first place, and that I could work mostly for experience and not because I needed the money. But, at the same time, I did my share of dues-paying, as it wasn’t like my jobs were so glamorous and in fact in many cases they were quite strenuous and monotonous. But, looking back, I can see how they all contributed to who I am today professionally. So, for those young’uns out there, wondering what good can come from licking 3000 envelopes or going overseas, keep your mind open and perhaps you’ll find there was a purpose and plan after all.

Cuts and Chats

My eye caught this cover article in the Penn newspaper earlier this week: "Scissors and style on 39th Street." It brought me back to my undergrad days at Penn, when I had this student entrepreneur beat on price: my haircuts were free. I found it to be a great dorm ministry - a demonstration of tangible service, and the perfect setting for conversations that were meaningful without being forced. I mean, besides attending a ballgame or going for a car ride, can you think of a more ideal context for two guys to have a good talk? Kudos to Collin Williams, and let's hope some of those junior barbers he wants to apprentice are Christians who want to use haircuttery as a platform for doing good and spreading some good news.

Innovate or Die

Whether on Facebook, in town halls, or even in the esteemed halls of Congress, discussion of health care reform can turn ugly. So perhaps I am unnecessarily inviting heckling by chiming in with more of my own, under-informed opinion. But I wanted to link to a nice interview in Popular Mechanics of Dean Kamen. You know him as Segway guy, but he holds 440 patents in total in a number of fields, including those that intersect with health care. He contests the notion that we have a cost problem in health care; rather, instead of fussing about cost, we should be encouraging innovation.

Of course, I am absolutely for this line of thinking. Consider what killed us barely a few generations ago that can now be treated with a single pill, injection, or routine surgical procedure. Today’s really expensive drugs that would only be available to the very rich if we all paid out of pocket are tomorrow’s really cheap drugs that can be available to practically anyone. What automatically kills or paralyzes us now could be spoken of with a laugh someday, as we easily beat it and enjoy longer and better lives as a result.

But that only happens if innovation is encouraged and not stifled: if the government’s essential role in basic research isn’t undercut by cuts, if makers of pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures and medical devices aren’t vilified as cold-hearted profit-seekers, if more people are encouraged to take a big swing because the threat of high risk is offset by the opportunity of high return.

I know I am simplifying a fantastically complicated topic. But what if leveling access to life-enhancing health care resources is not at odds with people and companies making a boatload of money. Rather, what if one necessarily happens because of the other? If framed in this way, might there be less shouting, and a path to a government role that gets us everything everyone wants? I hope we get this right; I can't wait for my grandkids to incredulously ask me, "You mean people used to die of cancer?"

PS On a personal note, check out this latest advance in finding a cure for paralysis: "Paralyzed Rats Walk Again."

Climate Change Policy Isn't So Black and White

I have read and appreciated Keith Hennessey's blog since its inception earlier this year. I particularly like his ability to meld economic theory with political reality. Yesterday's post is particularly worth reading if you're interested in environmental policy. There, he overlays where China is with where greenies are and where the Senate is.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear there's a place we can end up where everyone's happy. And so, let the sausage-making begin: deals, posturing, more deals, more posturing, and will we end up better than we are now, which we cannot afford to stay? I'm not so sure anymore.

Crash

Into my already busy life has come crashing in a number of stresses that have finally caught up to me. Of course, the main one was an actual crash, that of my family members, which has led to two trips to California, countless phone calls, and immeasurable anxiety.

The last two months have also brought day trips to Baltimore, New York City, Harrisburg, and Easton, a weekend church retreat, and a week at the Jersey Shore. We have Jada in a new school, we’re transitioning a new pastor into our church, our summer-long home renovations have largely come to a head, Amy is starting a new clinical rotation in the prisons, and work has been crazy.

Needless to say, I’ve been pretty worn out. I did not know if it was possible to go from tired to more tired to most tired, but it has happened. And so it was more out of necessity than any intentional action on my part that I actually took it a little easy this past weekend. I curled into bed with a stack of magazines and crossword puzzles before 8pm all three nights, one morning I slept all the way to 7am, and I hardly looked at our home computer. My to-do list for the weekend went largely untouched in favor of long family walks and even longer afternoon naps.

Nevertheless, I still feel like I’m in a sleep deficit. So the world may have to continue to spin without me for a little bit longer while I recharge some more.

Fall in Love, Eat Good Food, and Save the Planet . . . in Philadelphia

Philadelphia - gritty, blue-collar, throw snowballs at Santa Philadelphia - on the cutting edge? Absolutely. Here's three snapshots to prove it:

1. Here's another carbon footprint calculator, spearheaded by none other than the Nutter Administration here in Philadelphia: Erase Your Trace. Conveniently, to offset your family or firm's footprint, you can give to the City's Fairmount Park Conservancy, which will plant trees with your dough.

2. Here's some cool urban art you can peep while you ride the elevated train through West Philadelphia: A Love Letter For You. My favorite? "If you were here, I'd be home now." 1, 2, 3, . . . awww.

3. The best is yet to come, but I wanted to give you the early scoop on a very cool green/food/entrepreneurship/justice initiative being birthed by The Enterprise Center: Center for Culinary Enterprises. I'm telling you, you're going to love this one.

Passing the Torch

The Enterprise Center's annual fundraiser doubles as one of West Philadelphia's better feel-good events of the year. Passing the Torch is all about celebrating wealth creation in the minority community, recognizing entrepreneurs who have successfully built a business to scale and then passed it on to their next generation. If you work in the community development world, you're working to some degree to help make these sorts of happenings more commonplace.

Please consider joining us this year to acknowledge those who have worked their way to this success. The event will take place on Thursday, October 8. Tickets are $100 ($75 is tax-deductible), and you can purchase them or get more info at www.theenterprisecenter.com/events/ptt2009, or we'll take any size donation at www.theenterprisecenter.com. See you there!

Bridging the Generation, Faith, and Culture Gaps

Note: later this month, this post will be also be featured as my first as a guest blogger over at Talking About Generations, which looks at inter-generational dynamics in the workplace, and which I found out about through my participation over at Brazen Careerist.


There’s been a lot of talk, and rightly so, about diversity in the workplace. And yet almost all of the discussion centers on racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, with the occasional comment about sexual orientation. It seems our understanding and dialogue about diversity is not diverse enough; for I contend that our perspectives are also shaped profoundly by faith and generational considerations. Furthermore, extending the discussion isn’t just about adding to the number of categories we must now be mindful of, each category independent of the others; for it is the interplay between the categories that is truly interesting.

I did not grow up in a faith tradition, but became a Christian in my teen years. And to the extent that being a Christian meant attending religious services, making friends with good moral people, and not doing bad things, my parents were fine with my newfound faith. But, never one to do something halfway, as I grew in my faith, I felt increasingly challenged and invited to make it my entire worldview, to trade earthly treasures for heavenly ones, to work for the benefit of others and not for my own honor or gain, and to submit my agenda and my rules for that of my Creator and Savior. I spent my college years mentoring younger Christians in the dorms, went on a summer-long service trip to Eastern Europe, and parlayed my prestigious Wharton degree into a low-paying job at a starving non-profit in the inner city West Philadelphia neighborhood that I moved into after college and still live in today.

My parents, of course, thought I had lost my mind. And we began to clash. Looking back, I realize that at the time, I saw our conflict purely in faith terms: we had different beliefs, after all, and that must be why we were disagreeing on major life issues.

I know now that in addition to a faith gap, there was also a cultural and generational gap. My parents emigrated from Taiwan to America in the 1960’s to go to graduate school. The risk they took to leave all they knew was aptly and poignantly summarized by my mother, who was never mistaken for being chatty; she said, simply, “I bought a one-way ticket.” And yet they, like millions of others at the time, were drawn by the land of promise, to make a better life for themselves, and, more importantly in their minds, for their children. Their greatest desire was to work hard and ensure that their children had economic opportunities and financial security. Their view of work was as a vehicle for providing for family, a means to a greater end. Technical careers, and therefore technical educations, were particularly sought after, because they allowed for a maximum of financial reward with a minimum of job risk. Hence the proliferation of highly educated Asian immigrants in professions such as medicine, engineering, and science.

My generation is different. As the second generation, and the first born in the US, we value more highly things like prestige and power and influence. We desire to make a difference, in the religious and political and social realms. While our parents worked to live, we live to work, deriving identity and meaning and energy from it. And while our parents were more apt to cluster themselves with others of their particular country of origin, we are more comfortable building pan-Asian alliances, as well as reaching beyond Asians to other ethnic groups for our political, commercial, and social networks. Do I want to change the world because I believe in Jesus and the Bible? Absolutely. But it is clear that my worldview is profoundly influenced by cultural and generational pulls as well.

And so, these confluences of influence and perspective – race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, faith, and age – play out in manifold ways all around the world. As open-minded as we claim to be, we cannot help but look at our world in a certain way, and then, however subtly and sub-consciously, assume that others do, too. But if we are lucky enough to belong to congregations, communities, and companies that are composed of a diversity of individuals – diverse in every dimension – we are privy to a vast range of perspectives. And as a result, every once in a while, we learn something of what it means to look at the world from a slightly different angle. We don’t as quickly jump to negative conclusions or discount behaviors that were previously inexplicable to us, because we have been given the privilege of walking a mile or more in someone else’s shoes, after which we realize why someone who had walked in that way would think and act the way they do.

The notion of diversity – in a congregation, community, or company – is often brought up in a defensively-minded stance: we reactively sense that our homogeneity is not right, and want to fix it and make it better. I submit to you an alternative, more offensively-minded approach to diversity, one that is based on the necessity, in a world that rewards agility of thought, of having one’s perspectives healthily challenged and stretched by others’ differing perspectives. Is diversity the right thing to do, from the standpoint of morals and ethics and fairness? Absolutely. But, diversity also happens to be the very best way to constitute a group of people that is trying to achieve a common purpose, whatever that purpose might be. That’s why this Gen-X, cut-throat capitalist, conservative Republican, born-again Christian, second-generation Asian-American advocates for as much of it as possible.

Brad Lidge is a Winner in My Book

Funny how entire careers are defined by one moment, one image. Before October 2008, Brad Lidge's was that of surrendering a mammoth home run to St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Albert Pujols in Game 5 the 2005 National League Championship Series. With Lidge's Astros just one out away from a trip to the World Series, the Cards got two men on and then Pujols struck a towering shot into the Houston air. Houston recovered the next day and went on to the World Series, but the Pujols bomb became the first of many meltdowns for the previously invincible Lidge.

Fast forward to 2008, and most Philadelphians know that Lidge was literally invincible for the World Champion Phillies. Given 48 opportunities to close out a win, Lidge converted all 48, including the deciding Game 5 against the Tampa Bay Rays, ending 25 years of Philadelphia sports futility. The crowning image of Lidge on his knees looking to the sky is forever seared in the minds of hard-luck Philadelphia fans.

And yet, I believe that Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Andy Martino is absolutely right when he says that Lidge's 2009 season is a more accurate marker of the man's true character. In an article last weekend entitled "Brad Lidge Aces a Test of Character," Martino correctly observes that the now-embattled Lidge, whose 2009 season has been as imperfect as 2008's was perfect, has been nothing but gracious and forthright amidst his many failings. In an era in which we tolerate the petulant and the boastful, how about a hand for someone who makes no excuses and doesn't hide from his mistakes?

Phillies fans may find it difficult to have good feelings about their closer - not after 10 blown saves and many more antacid-inducing moments. But, while everyone loves a winner, the real take-away for me from Brad Lidge's career is how he conducted himself when he didn't win. That he did so with grace and courage, and not that he threw a third strike past Eric Hinske in Game 5 of the 2008 World Series, is what makes him a winner in my book.

What If Money is Nothing

It was a simple enough question, particularly at a retreat whose central topic was money and faith: "What would our church look like in the future if money was no object?" And yet, as my small group discussed, it struck us that, rather than dreaming up fancifully expensive ideas that we were now free to consider since we weren't bound by the constraint of limited budgets, we were led to actions that cost very little if anything to the church:

1) Individual congregants loving their neighbors and then connecting with other church members for support and prayer in those outreach efforts;

2) Basic instruction for Christian living for different walks and stages of life; and

3) Peer and mentoring relationships whereby support could be given and received, and godly behavior modeled.

Conveniently enough, all three and more can be had in our existing small group structures, whereby groupings of people meet in each others' houses for Bible study, prayer, and mutual encouragement. The church can facilitate these gatherings - by training leaders, providing instructional resources, and offering child care - but largely, these meet-ups are organic in nature, formed and reshaped and advanced according to the whims of individual members.

Conversely, a lot of what we currently tend to focus our time, worries, and money on are things that maintain the church structure itself, whether physical (i.e. the 100+ year old building) or institutional (i.e. programs). As one participant noted, when Jesus sent His disciples out, having modeled ministry for them and now giving them the opportunity to go do some themselves, He didn't first buy a building or launch a fundraising campaign or form a committee or figure out a budget.

In light of this consensus - that church life is about being in nurturing relationships and about supporting each other as we seek to influence those in our own spheres, not about sustaining our existing bureaucracy and physical plant - we wondered if our church's current financial woes weren't a blessing and not a curse. Having less to spend, rather than narrowing our ambitions, could instead focus them on the things that really matter, things that money can't buy but love can compel.

Where do we go from here? I do not know. But, as our dollars dwindle, may our zeal for God's work rise, until we are as He would want us to be, and His name is known in our community and among our circles of influence.

Governments, Cities, and Suburbs

I was going to chime in on Bryan Caplan's post on whether government policies have encouraged or discouraged more suburbanization when I noticed a commenter had already stated all of my counterpoints. Two additional obvious points regarding federal policies are the home mortgage tax deduction (encourages more house consumption) and the Interstate Highway System (encourages more driving and decentralization).

One thing missing that I'd like to see is the geographic distribution of government funding. My assumption is that cities get the lion's share of research grants (via universities) and transportation dollars (via public transit authorities), but remember that they also represent the lion's share of population, jobs, and economic activity. Can anyone point me to a fair, reasoned exposition of where the money goes, to see if cities are underfunded or overfunded compared to suburbs?

Could Carbon Tax Be Clunky, Too

Hat tip to a co-worker of mine for pointing me in the direction of this Wall Street Journal article about France contemplating a carbon tax: "France Moves to Levy Carbon Tax on Fossil Fuels." Ominously, as my colleague points out, carbon tax policy may be as rife as cap-and-trade with horse-trading: loopholes are inevitable as the price of support, leading to inefficiencies that steeply mitigate the theoretical gains to environment and economics. I have posted early and often about a carbon tax's advantage over cap-and-trade being its simplicity, and am no forced, not necessarily to eat my words, but to be as vigilant about a carbon tax policy's details as I have been about cap-and-trade. Let the games begin!

Philadelphia Futures

I had the honor of joining 140 Philadelphia-area leaders at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia's Greater Philadelphia Leadership Exchange earlier this week. I claim membership in the first, albeit unofficial, leadership exchange, to Phoenix in 2004 with four other young Philadelphians. Since then, the Economy League has taken a far larger crew to Chicago and Atlanta, to compare and contrast, and build the region's leadership muscle.

This year's version was a bit of a stay-cation, as we holed up at the Cira Centre atop 30th Street Station. I took lots of notes, but wanted to share just a few thoughts that were sparked from this auspicious gathering:

1. Our homework assignment beforehand was to write two questions about the future of Greater Philadelphia that we wanted to know the answers to. Absent any additional context, I came up with the following - 1) When ordering at Geno's, will I have to speak English? 2) What will it take for Josh Kopelman to stay in Philadelphia? The first references the extent to which we will be immigration-friendly or not; the second, our ability to retain smart VC/entrepreneurial types like Kopelman, whose hit list includes Infonautics, Half.com, and First Round Capital. Others at my table sounded themes such as workforce development, manufacturing, zoning, government budgets, and job creation.

2. A scenario planning exercise added some context to the homework assignment. Since there is so much uncertainty in the world, it is counterproductive to draw a trend line and plan around what results. Rather, it is better to create narratives about possible future scenarios, and then track key variables over time to see which narrative is closest to coming true. When couched in this way, our team quickly settled on the following - 1) To what extent are we producing the brains our knowledge economy needs? 2) What will energy costs be? The first speaks to our ability to produce from our public schools working bees who have the baseline technological and technical skills to function in the knowledge economy, and from our universities other worker bees who have the really sophisticated scientific skills to help our firms and industries be world-class; the second, a vital input variable that will drive the extent to which high-density, auto-independent hubs like Philadelphia will thrive as long car commutes and geographic isolation are increasingly penalized.

3. Technology's transformation of live, work, and play, by allowing us to generate a considerable proportion of our necessary "touches" (my pet word for connectivity) virtually, actually feeds our need for physical touches. Hence, cities and regions that contain high qualities and quantities of physical meeting places for such physical touches will have a leg up when it comes to attracting tomorrow's people, jobs, and firms; think of mixed-use communities (live), research parks (work), and interactive museums (play). Dear urbanists: it turns out your focus on "place making," far from being the expendable work of idealists detached from reality, is crucial to the competitiveness and viability of your regions.

All in all, a day brimming with vitality, good networking, and challenging ideas. In other words, a day well spent. Kudos to the speakers, my fellow participants, and the Economy League for making it all happen.

Brazen Career Choices

Having followed Penelope Trunk's blog for about a month, I decided to join her Brazen Careerist, a social networking site "where ideas are your resume." So far, I haven't yet done anything with my profile except set up my blog to automatically post there, not unlike how I'm currently populating my Twitter page.

Unbeknownst to me, one of my posts, on Gen Y, was pegged as a Featured Post earlier this week, generating a spirited discussion consisting of many more comments than I am used to receiving. Many of the comments focused on the notion of "paying your dues," although I did not mean for my post to center on this. But I am glad for all who have chimed in, for they reinforce for me the importance of this idea within Gen Y, whose lives have been so accelerated and whose tech skills so blisteringly advanced that the thought of "waiting for your turn" is anathema.

It is refreshingly inspiring to see folks for Gen Y speak of such a meritocracy, a sense that not only should talent and not pecking order determine who holds the cards, but that such a notion is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated, unless it is ignorantly brought up by a Gen X'er or a Boomer. We often speak of "entitlement" when we describe Gen Y, but as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his most recent book, "Outliers," entitlement has a positive aspect to it: the sense that people take for granted that they have control over their own destiny. This is the kind of entitlement I can get behind, and hope for more of, as it relates to Gen Y.

There is an important implication for inter-generational settings such as geographic jurisdictions, companies, and even family structures. When we are resigned to a sense of zero-sum game, your gain is necessarily at the expense of my loss. Unsurprisingly, people who presume the pie's size to be stagnant will contest any newbie's attempt to garner a slice; hence, in such cases, the prevalent sense from the old guard to the new to "wait your turn, kid." Again, this sort of dues-paying is anathema to Gen Y.

In a free country, the youth movement responds in one of two ways. First, it can take its slice anyway. Beautifully, we're seeing this in Philly, an old-school political/institutional/cultural culture if there was one. It used to be that everyone knew that you had to kiss so-and-so's ring in order to get something done around here (insert your favorite so-and-so here). But, between a string of indictments and a literal stall in both the state and city budgets, youngsters are deciding they needn't wait around for someone's blessing or someone else's money to organize themselves, take action, and make progress. And so we have seen a remarkable flourishing of grassroots movements in a diversity of topics from fresh food to Asian films to, yes, naked bicycling.

Second, youngsters can look at a culture frozen in zero-sum mentality and unwilling to dole out any slices to newbies and say, "Well, we'll take our energy and ideas and sweat and tears somewhere else, then." Which is why winning the "cool" battle actually does matter, since perception can become reality as it relates to attracting and retaining a critical mass of young talent. And, again, old-school Philly is starting to gain some street cred here, too, no longer automatically losing to media faves like Austin, Portland, and Seattle, but signaling its relevance via video game conventions and "Junto" gatherings and green economy activism.

I've managed and interfaced within enough Gen Y'ers to have my share of eye-rolling moments. But I also respect and admire the spirit from which that impatience and entitlement spring. The recession and other macro-economic forces have placed a huge fork in the road for all generations, but the time is especially momentous for Gen Y'ers, who are for the first time setting down their career paths, these early decisions having consequences that will follow them for the rest of their long lives. Thanks to Brazen Careerist for giving me an opportunity to hear from some of the more ambitious and articulate among them, and in doing so giving me more optimism that among this generation can be found those, when faced with this fork in the road, will make the right choice and do so boldly and brazenly.

All Booked Up

Reading is an important part of my life. As an introvert, one of the ways I recharge is by reading by myself in a quiet place. I am inherently curious about a wide swath of topics. And because my day job is as a consultant, it’s vital I stay up to date on a variety of issues.

And yet my weekly schedule hardly affords me the time I wish I had to get through the mountains of periodicals, online articles, and books I have accumulated for myself. At this point, my only reliable blocks of time are right before I go to bed; up to seven days a week, I might have about an hour between the time I shut out the world and the time I turn out the light.

Enter a recent spate of travel, which has given me big chunks of time for quiet reading. Although all the hustle and bustle has been tiring, how I’ve savored these moments to read:

* A bus trip to New York City bought me about four hours to catch up on old Economist Magazine surveys.

* A train ride to Baltimore was just enough time to skim through a pile of green economy articles I had printed out for myself.

* Taking the train and bus back home from Ocean City in the middle of my family’s week-long vacation (up at the crack of dawn to get into the office by 8:30a, back out to OC by dinnertime the day after), I got through three short books.

* My train ride to Harrisburg for business in the middle of this short stop home got me through a pile of transportation policy articles I had been meaning to get to.

* Finally, my cross-country plane rides to and from San Jose allowed me to plow through four books and a short stack of magazines.

Alas, the refreshment derived from this recharge has been offset by the frantic pace I have kept these past two weeks criss-crossing the country. One of these days, I'll get to read without it having to dovetail with travel. Oh, what a treat that will be.

Y's at a Fork in the Road

A few weeks back, I wrote a snarky comment on my friend's blog post about Generation Y:

Mike, you're talking about a generation whose parents helicoptered around them, who got trophies for simply participating and not necessarily winning or excelling, and who (up until 12-24 months ago) thought that house prices and stock markets could only go up, and you're wondering why people feel entitled?

What I'm holding my breath on for Gen Y is whether they are going to be permanently scarred by grim employment prospects (like Japan's "lost generation"), or whether the experience gives them the right perspective to reform their entitled ways and be more like us cynical, workaholic, no-one-is-going-to-look-out-for-me-and-my-parents-are-divorcing-and-the-world-is-going-to-end-in-nuclear-holocaust-so-I-just-have-to-take-care-of-myself Gen X'ers.

Before you dismiss my rantings as ho-hum intergenerational trash-talking, note that a recent Business Week article picked up on these same themes. The article's premise is that the recession is giving young'uns unprecedented opportunity for responsibility and leadership, and profiles a handful of go-getters who are doing really cool stuff at a really young age as a result of the employment and economic wreckage.

The article sounds an ominous note, however, by suggesting that these success stories are not indicative of Gen Y, quoting a survey that found that while over half of Gen Yers surveyed felt their careers were in limbo, 93 percent were unlikely to push for more responsibilities. Common responses to dead-end jobs were to wait out the rough economy, go back to school, and "do what I'm told, nothing more, nothing less." I would be remiss if I did not chime in here to say that these responses are anathema to the typical Gen Xer, who sees opportunity in crisis and finds recessions the best time to launch one's own business.

Here's the money paragraph from the article, expressing far better than I did in my rant to my friend, but similar in substance:

For Generation Y, all this represents a dilemma. As a generation, it never suffered from lack of ambition. But to get the responsibilities they covet, millennials will need a new outlook on work. Often criticized for a sense of entitlement, members of this cohort will have to knuckle down and pay their dues. And though often seen as needing direction, they'll have to make do without hand-holding. Plus, the search for work-life balance that Gen Y considers a priority will be more elusive than ever.

Intergenerational sniping aside, I'm rooting for Gen Y to have it all: work-life balance AND wisdom from dues-paying and self-starting AND responsibility beyond their years. But to get there, these cats will have to make some tough choices. The irony for me is that the one-letter appellation this generation has taken on - Y - looks like a fork in the road. So which path will it be?

Afflicted

While on vacay, I read John Piper's new book, Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ, which by the way is available for free download at the Desiring God website. It covers ground I've covered before, but far more eloquently and powerfully, between Piper's steady exegesis and remarkable biographical blurbs of three saints who suffered greatly for the sake of propagating the message of Jesus as Lord and Savior.

I particularly like Pastor Piper's explanation of what it means to "fill up afflictions": not that Jesus' afflictions were inadequate, but they have been as of yet inadequately made known to the ends of the earth. And, as I have come to believe as well, suffering is not just a consequence of spreading the word but is itself an important and in fact necessary conduit.

Of course, I am tempted to leave it like that: read the book, blog about it, recommend it to others, and be fuller for it . . . but not really have it grip me as the truth should. Having recently read Mark's account of Jesus' earliest days, when by sheer force of authority he called people to leave their vocations and their loved ones and follow Him, I am challenged to consider whether I too would leave job and family to be spent, time and talents and belongings and even my very life, to make Him known to those who do not yet know of it.

At the very least, I am reminded of the need to daily die to self, and to its ambitions and comfort- and glory-seeking ways, to willfully and gladly subordinate what I think to be best for what truly is best, which is to follow Jesus and trust that even and especially suffering that I bear along the way will be part of a great story of redemption and salvation. Easier said than done. But, thankfully, truth-tellers like Pastor Piper, and martyrs like those profiled in his most recent book, have gone ahead of me, and found the road, however hard and costly, to lead to life.

"I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." - Colossians 1:24

Memory Drive

A couple of years back, before Twitter entered the mainstream, I recall reading an article by an early adopter. He noted how interesting it was to follow avid Twitter-posting friends; microblogging had tapped into the subtleties of their lives via minute-by-minute details.

Our memories are finite, vacations and work stints and entire decades distilled down to fragments of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. But what if you recorded all of those sensations and thoughts - all of them - and could play them back at will? Like the accounts of those Twitter-posting friends, our lives would regain more of the richness they once had but which finite memories were unable to retain.

This appears to be the premise of Gordon Bell's work at Microsoft. Called "lifelogging," it entails documenting everything - taking photos and recording conversations, scanning receipts and mapping paths taken. Life is now searchable, each of its moments capturable.

Having just completed a re-read of one of my favorite Theodore Roosevelt biographies, Edmund Morris' "Theodore Rex," I am intrigued by such a level of documentation. TR sensed his greatness and seemed, even in the present, to be speaking and writing for posterity. Thanks to his attention to documentation, books like "Theodore Rex" can retell scenes from his life as if 100+ years had not passed by.

I have been blogging for six and a half years now, and I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have read my own stuff when in a pinch. I believe that every life is unspeakably interesting, infused by the Almighty with comedy and tragedy, meaning and purpose. And yet we miss so many lessons, so much insight, because we fail to remember; or, having remembered, we subsequently forget.

When I am struggling and can enter a keyword into my blog search and look back on different posts that I had written on a particular topic, it is one of God's ways of reminding me, "See, you and I have intersected on this issue before; and see how I knew best all along." Invariably, I resolve to myself that I ought to write more. No matter hackneyed and mundane a particular thought might be, if I write it down, I may have use for it later; but if I fail to write it down, it is lost forever.

Consider the following "equations," if you will. The first is inspired by Carol Burnett, the second by John McCain, and third is so universal I'm sure I'm not the first to have thought it:

1. Comedy = Tragedy + Time

2. Courageous Act = Fearful Moment + Inner Resolve + Time

3. Mom's Annoying Scoldings + One's Own Child + Time = Our Own Words to Live By

Notice how "time" features in all three equations. It is clear that the perspective that time brings infuses past moments with meaning and goodness. But if we fail to remember a moment, there is nothing for time and perspective to layer on top of. Conversely, if we capture the moment, we may just give ourselves the chance for time and perspective to show us what we could not have seen back then but that is crystal clear now.

I'm not sure that I have the time or resources to snap hundreds of photos and write dozens of posts each day. But I wish I did. And, absent actively documenting my moments, I will strive to at least be fully present for each of them, if not electronically filing them away then doing so mentally; for who knows what time, perspective, chance, and God will do with them down the road.

Font Wars

Given my somewhat bizarre interest in fonts, this article from Time Magazine caught my eye: "The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Verdana." It appears Ikea is scrapping its customized Futura for plain-jane Verdana, which designers are in an uproar over because Verdana was always (and, as they sigh, obviously) intended for on-screen use and not print use. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, adopts a different metaphor to explain the problem. "Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it's dumbed down and overused. It's a bit like using Lego to build a skyscraper, when steel is clearly a superior choice." Others seem mystified by the choice to eliminate one of the chain's key identifying features. "The former typeface definitely better reflected Ikea's design philosophy, giving it a very special, unique flavor that actually fit the company's style," says Vitaly Friedman, editor in chief of the online Smashing Magazine, which is dedicated to Web design. "With Verdana being used all across the Web, Ikea's image not only loses originality, but also credibility and the reputation that the company has built since the 1940s."

Here's another excerpt:

"They went cheap, in other words," counters Bucharest designer Iancu Barbarasa, who blogged about the font change on his website. If he sounds somewhat bitter, there's a reason. With its attention to the curve of even a $9 lampshade, Ikea has become renowned for its understanding of good design. "Designers have always thought of Ikea as one of their own," Barbarasa notes. "So now, in a way, the design community feels betrayed." Indeed, the desire to remind people — and corporations — that design matters is what spurred design consultant Ursache to start a petition asking Ikea to do away with the offensive Verdana typeface. "Look, I know this isn't world hunger," he says. "But if a company like Ikea can make this mistake, you have to wonder who is going to lead when it comes to design."

Um, isn't that the whole premise of Ikea? That cheap and simple and common IS chic? I like what the Ikea spokesperson had to say about the decision: "It's more efficient and cost-effective. [Because it is freely distributed by Microsoft and can therefore be easily used across countries and alphabets.] Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface." Imagine that: simple and modern-looking. Sounds like a timeless design approach to me.

Cap and Trade is Too Taxing

Back from a week at the beach, I missed at the time this nice column in the Inky about the simplicity of a carbon tax as compared to the unnecessary complexities of cap-and-trade. The Rube Goldberg reference is a nice analogy.

The only beef I have with the article is that it didn't go far enough, stopping at simply insinuating that cap-and-trade creates all sorts of useless regulatory work instead of directly offering that that's why DC prefers it in the first place. After all, you get to look tough on the environment and create lots of work for your friends and promise something for nothing. A carbon tax, on the other hand, just sounds like something painful, you leave nothing for bureacrats to have to inspect or approve or track, and, let's be honest, it has the word "tax" in it.

As for this right-leaning pro-business capitalist pig, in this case I'm for the tax. It is, after all, the less taxing of the two options.

The Role of Government

I remain skeptical about the mass adoption of high-speed rail outside of the Northeast Corridor (PS Megan McArdle is also skeptical), but I want to go on record as saying I’m not holding it to nearly as rigorous a cost-benefit screen as others in the blogosphere. As this interesting little report points out, a lot of the stuff we take for granted and laud independent entrepreneurs for today were made possible by massive initial government involvement: think of transportation infrastructure like rail lines or technology innovations like microchips and the Internet.

So if regions want to tax themselves to raise money for transit, and the feds want to ante up early dollars to get things going, that’s fine. My cynicism does not reflect scorn for such public investments as boondoggles, but rather a hunch that low-density places will have to make massive infrastructural enhancements as well as fundamental attitudinal shifts in order to reap the promised environmental and mobility benefits of transit.

Hard-core libertarians want government out of everything; hard-core liberals want government in everything. Barack Obama was right in this regard: it’s not about how big or small government is, but whether it’s being effective in what it’s doing. Easier said than done: we all have our complaints about government being involved where it shouldn’t be, or not involved where it should, or ineffective or downright counter-productive when it tries to do something. But, with apologies to the Voluntaryist movement, government has a role in our lives; the challenge, which all we citizens should fuss about and hold them accountable to, is to figure out where it should be involved and where it shouldn’t, and within the spheres they should be involved, how they should be involved.

I Wash My Hands on This Issue

As eco-friendly as I’ve tried to be in my life, there are two things supposedly bad for the environment that I’m having a hard time shedding: plastic bags and paper towels. As to the first, we’re starting to fill them up as much as possible before throwing them out, reuse them when we can, and shift some use to cloth bags.

But as to the second, I cannot seem to shake their use, especially in the kitchen and in public bathrooms. This article provides a fairly pro-paper towel conclusion, when compared to convention hand dryers and the new fangled Dyson hand dryers, at least when it comes to speed and germs.

But I thought the whole point about paper towel hating, from an environmental standpoint, was that they generate loads of waste? So, time and germ considerations aside, what’s worse for the environment: going through reams and reams of paper, or making and then running higher-tech and electricity-requiring blowers? If someone can point me to an article that covers this question like this Slate article covered the whole “cloth vs. disposable diapers” question, I’d appreciate it; I’d like to know how I should dry my hands in the men’s room.

He Makes Me Smile

Hat tip to the Freakonomics blog for introducing me to Brian Mullaney, founder of the Smile Train and for leading with this kick-ass quote:

Most charities don’t see themselves as a business. … [They] can be terribly managed, pay people poorly, and yet never go out of business. They’re almost like churches; people say, “That’s O.K., because their hearts are in the right place.” At Smile Train, we pay people market-rate salaries and if they’re really good, we give them a bonus, and if they’re not, we fire them — we don’t care where their heart is; it can go somewhere else.

Correcting facial disfigurements in poor children, and rigorously employing the best technical and business methods available to do so? This cut-throat capitalist approves.

Philadelphia, Video Game Mecca

Philadelphia, video game mecca? You betcha. This post from Innovation Philadelphia notes some of its natural advantages: close to but cheaper than other big hubs, established cultural and artistic roots, and lots of college kids.

Could a future version of Grand Theft Auto feature cars careening onto the plaza in front of Comcast Center or plowing through vegetable stands in Italian Market? One can dream.