RIP Josh Hancock, St. Louis Cardinals RP

Vestavia Hills High School, 1996: 9-0, 0.92 ERA
Auburn University, 1997: Member of College World Series team
Drafted by Red Sox in 1998, with his debut on September 10, 2002
Signed as minor league free agent with St. Louis Cardinals on February 21, 2006

I remember very clearly being a freshman at Vestavia and going to see this incredible pitcher we had on our baseball team. Our baseball teams were in the middle of a run during the entire decade of the 1990's of winning state championship after state championship in baseball, and Josh Hancock was an integral part of that for multiple years. Between 1991 and 2000, over a 10-year stretch, Vestavia only failed to win the state championship one single time, winning it 9 of those years and 7 years in a row at one point.

Over a three-year career spanning from 1994 to 1996, Josh Hancock went a combined 28-1, earning enough wins to put him among the all-time Alabama leaders in career wins according to the Alabama High School Athletic Association.

Tragically, just as Hancock was seemingly finding his way in the major leagues with the Cardinals, this accident happens. RIP.

Logged into my MySpace page earlier tonight, and for some reason I feel compelled to post about what this experience was like.

I suppose I was expecting to quickly ascertain that there has been hardly any activity on anyone's accounts, not much new information, and quickly be able to log off and move on to another part of my internet rounds. After all, this is certainly the case for me - I haven't been to the site in months.

This will probably come as no surprise, but I hardly even recognized my "friends" list (which includes many actual friends, in addition to clubs, politicians, bands I've never heard, and who knows what else since I just summarily accept most friend requests without question). Pictures of the people I actually do know have changed, most people had logged in within the past 48 hours, lots of new blog posts, layouts of pages have changed, etc.

For whatever reason, this really blindsided me. People my age actually customize their MySpace? And keep it updated on a regular basis? People of all different types, backgrounds, careers?

Yes.

How strange!

Not too strange to the mainstream media, which has been on top of this for some time now, and certainly not too strange to the entire generation of core social networking users that makes up MySpace's user base. But certainly strange to me, at least for today.

Someday, actually probably much sooner than I would imagine, they'll be teaching case studies in business schools around the world about MySpace.com...that site used by the 40-year-old administrative assistant, 32-year-old corporate hot shot, the 55-year-old musician/poet, the 22-year-old meth addict, the 19-year-old college freshman, and the 26-year-old blogger :)

You know that favorite hangout you had back in high school? Now imagine that EVERYONE YOU'VE EVER MET WAS THERE.

ALL THE TIME.

EVERY DAY.

And that's what MySpace represents - communication, 24/7/365.

We already live in a world where people don't dare to be different. The mob mentality will grow to new heights in a world of 24/7 interconnectivity. Nothing will be hidden anymore - everything will be transparent and right there, out in the open, caught on cameraphone or recorded by webcam.

As new generations raised on this level of interconnectivity rise up to take positions out in the labor force and in other positions of influence over time, the results will be felt.

Leaders who understand the MySpace era and command the mob will reap rewards of unprecedented power and resources. Medical research will move five times faster than it ever has before, creating new cures. Politicians will be cleaner than ever before, since the cost of a mistake is tremendous and there are no more secrets. Business will seize upon crowdsourced information to polish products and services to a shiny perfection, creating new dimensions for competition we haven't thought of yet and raising the importance of human capital and marketing more than ever. Social causes will continue to escalate in importance, as messages of despair and need travel around the world as fast as you can blink, and efforts to address them get organized almost as fast. Organizations like The iTest will do things never thought possible. The world will move faster than ever before, largely for the better.

But, for now, as I sit and read the poetry of a high school classmate, contemplate the politics of another classmate living overseas, and share the happiness in the new baby of a co-worker and new relationship of an old friend - all thanks to MySpace - it's worth a moment to sit and also think about the bigger picture.

Thanks Mike and Jeff (college friends and former roommates with me ) for the insightful comments to the VT blog.

Satya (member of the Vestavia class of 1999; frequently abused by my fantasy baseball team) has started a blog about medical issues and whatever else he feels like discussing, which can be viewed here.

These three blogs aren't even close to all the blogs I read on any sort of regular basis. But isn't it funny how good blogs are at making us feel like we're listening to someone, almost in person? Blogs are a critical part of the way I learn all sorts of new things, which is a pretty incredible statement if you think about it.

For those people who actually attempt to better understand the world around them, blogs are an unbelievable tool. I can actually read what you think, but at MY pace and as many times as I need to understand your point of view. In real life, if you were saying all that stuff, I'd probably just tune you out. And then where would we be?

I don't think we have a good grasp on just how far communication gets advanced when blogs are part of the equation. It is certainly leaps and bounds beyond where it would've been otherwise.


Now, for an unrelated note: one of my all-time favorite songs, "Dream in Color" by Black Lab, is a song you should definitely download. I remember clearly the first time I heard it - I got the album for Christmas in 2005 after being excited to find out Black Lab had a new album out, and heard the song in my car when I was driving to work one day. I stayed in the car once I got to work to play it through again and have been listening to it frequently since that day.

In case its not clear up front, I listen to a ton of different music. All sorts of stuff. When a song stays with me like this after the first couple of months, I know its something I'll be listening to probably the rest of my life simply because it resonates with me so much.

[Black Lab's first album, "Your Body Above Me," which came out sometime around my 8th or 9th grade year (1994-1995? Somewhere around there. I think.) was spectacular in its darkness and moody temperament, but the second album ("See the Sun") which "Dream In Color" is taken from is just as good. "Wash It Away" was the radio single from the first album, so some people will remember the band from their bit of radio exposure they got early on. A third album just came out recently but I haven't purchased it yet from Black Lab's website, though I will be doing that soon.]

While the lyrics of the song are fairly abstract, the song paints an unmistakable picture of romantic optimism and addresses the ambiguity between what happens in our lives and what we intended...or dreamed. The song also uses imagery of marriage and partnership to make the shared vision that the song discusses even more powerful and compelling.

The song could be dreaming of an as-yet-unfulfilled vision - a dream that hasn't yet come to pass - or the song could be reflecting on a life gone by, made complete through marriage and looking forward to meeting again in the afterlife. Or the song could be at some point inbetween.

The song just explodes musically, thanks to some brilliant instrumentation and clever engineering, which helps illustrate the unbridled optimistic tone of the piece.

In the work environment, regardless of industry or profession, you've got all sorts of people who long since forgot about dreams. Not only do most people lack any sort of vision as to what dreams might be possible to achieve, and the discipline through which they might be attained, but most people even go as far as to seem incapable of deriving any joy from their day-to-day existence at all. This isn't to say these people don't smile, laugh, make a joke, etc...but when you watch them over time, you can clearly see they are making a trade-off out of perceived necessity, and not out of passion.

The post-9/11 world (and I suppose its the post-Virginia Tech world, now, too) we live in is a world that fears any risk exposure of any kind, and craves continuity and stability. People simply can't tolerate the temporary vagueness, the momentary ambiguity, brought on by change. Therefore, people end up stuck in veritable no-man's-land, and they stay there. Sometimes for a career.

"Dream in Color" and its triumphant story is a perfect reality-check for me, helping hold me to the truth that God didn't put anyone here to be complacent, to be lazy, or to not fulfill potential by chasing passions in life. And...we weren't put here to chase those dreams alone.


"Dream In Color" - Black Lab

Kiss me once
Just once
You think it's love
Or something close

Do you recall
you say I was sleeping
but I know what I saw.

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
colors have blurred this picture we made.

Ask me once, or twice,
well, they ring them bells,
they're throwing rice
at you and me.
But it wasn't enough...
say, what more could I be

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
colors have blurred this picture we made.

So sleep all day, and watch TV all night...
pictures playing in black and white.

I close my eyes...
I close my eyes...

There were nights I swear we flew.
Dreaming in color, I was dreaming beside you.
Now the sky has gone to gray;
these colors have blurred the picture we made.

There were nights I swear we flew
Dreaming in red, I was dreaming with you
Now the sky has gone to gray
Colors have blurred this picture we made

I was dreaming in color.

There were nights I swear we flew...

The strange, sad tale of the Virginia Tech shootings became so much more bizarre now with the confirmation that the shooter deliberated over this for at least a couple of weeks and possibly longer. Sending videos of his ramblings and bewildered, angry thoughts to NBC, inbetween the shooting incidents at the dorm and the engineering building where he killed most of his victims, is just insane.

Enough has been said about this lunatic to last several lifetimes, but how do we expand the safety net to ensure that the warning signs people like this give off actually result in restorative action, and not inaction?

I think of an individual who lived on my freshman hall at Vanderbilt. Very depressed, very bizarre behavior, would threaten people and actually spent an alarming amount of time watching and re-watching "American Psycho." This guy (who some readers of this will know who I'm talking about) could've been set off while we were in school and certainly could have committed acts of random violence. It just didn't happen, for whatever reason.

This individual ended up dropping out of school later in that same freshman year, and committing suicide a couple of years later.

Is it a masculinity issue? How much is the presence of violence in our culture to blame? Is it just a random atrocity? Or are we going to have to endure another one of these episodes again in the next 2-3 years? This VT guy cited "Eric and Dylan" from the Columbine incident as his brothers-in-arms, after all...this latest incident could spark even more.

The whole thing is just disgusting and very unsettling. Who knows where it goes from here.

I like to talk in this space about the "global war for talent" - that topic that keeps human resources executives up at night, wondering how to best attract and retain top talent within a company workforce. I like to talk about this issue, and human resources in general, because (as I've noted here before) I strongly believe H.R. is the most important, most strategic business function in the modern corporation.

Almost without fail, when the topic of competing for talent comes up, someone inevitably says "well, EVERYONE is replaceable," like that has something to do with the core topic of avoiding search costs, turnover costs, etc. associated with high turnover. Which it doesn't.

But let's address that statement for a minute:

IS EVERYONE REPLACEABLE?

The politically correct answer, of course, is yes. YES, of course everyone is replaceable. YES, no business is devastated by the loss of one key person. YES, any functional team in business (or any other area of life) can pick up the pieces when someone leaves, and move on.

But is it that simple?

My favorite example here is Michael Jordan, circa 1993, and his impact on the Chicago Bulls. NOW tell me that everyone is replaceable.

The rules of the NBA dictate you can only have five players on the court at once. So, while replacing Michael Jordan on an NBA roster might require two, three, or four individuals to fill those shoes and replace that production, you can't have that many extra people on the court.

In business, this isn't so much of an issue. If one person's loss can only be replaced by adding two people to fill the void, there's only the issue of cost.

There's still a problem, though: if losing a special person requires the hiring of more than one person to fill the void, there's still a FEELING of loss - a nasty pessimism / cynicism - that exists among those left behind within the organization. If that person left, and he/she is so good and so great at what they do, what am I missing by still being here? Those feelings are unavoidable in situations of high turnover, or even low turnover but among key performers. A shadow is cast upon the rest of the group from that point forward. A-level performers should never be put in a position to choose.

So, the business takeaway here is that while everyone is technically replaceable, in reality, this should never be a question that gets asked.

Retention of top talent requires constant paranoia, constant attention, constant asking of "how can we better serve our workforce and make them more productive?" If the question of "is this person actually replaceable?" is a way of life, then the organization has already lost.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Then, the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.


- Phillip Brooks (1835-1893), Episcopal Bishop



Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

- Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

Even with as well as the iTest Tournament of Champions is going (Round 3 begins tomorrow, check out some of the problems at www.theitest.com), it's strange to think that between The iTest in September and the Tournament of Champions in March that those will be the only math events the iTest will hold during the year.

Now that both of these events are up and running and have some momentum behind them, we're going to be focusing exclusively on branching out and creating some compelling competitive experiences beyond math. The iTest CS, our computer science competition, will be launching in full force in Spring 2008, and we'll be moving to pilot another competition probably later that year.

Additionally, over the next month, we're going to be kicking off a full-fledged capital campaign as we need to begin raising awareness of the iTest and raising the money we're going to need to take the organization to the next level.

We are partnering with GroundSpring.org on our fundraising site (which is viewable here) and hope to have some success attracting funds from private individuals, corporations, and foundations through this channel.