Disorientation

I'm a little off balance these days, having spent a few too many days in a few too many cities. It's not that I mind travel at all, it's just the completely retarded unexpected bodewash travel that messes with my khi.

I haven't been diarizing, nor much blogging in this period, but a lot of things are happening. If I could have a week at home, I'd be back on track. And I suspect I'll get that soon, but at the moment, I'm power-relaxing which means I don't leave the couch for anything but biological basics, and if I must, it freaks me out. Such behavior leads to 8 hours of Halo at a time, pizza crusts and bad breath. Very untidy.

However life moves on interestingly. The huge news is that my employer has been surgically split in two and the part I occupy grafted into the service of a burgeoning Indian defense contractor. The company is Rolta, and we have been encouraged to think of it as the Lockheed of India. Not the Lockheed-Martin mind you, that would be too ambitious. But suffice it to say that this is the engineering services company that stands to profit very mightily should India accept the 123 Treaty, because they help build nuclear power plants. We are the global IT for this company, Rolta, which has been listed as a global challenger, one of only two midcaps from India which is poised to break into the global 1000 in the next five years. Considering the case presented last week, it's not a slam dunk, but it's very likely.

It brings up the BRIC idea again, and another personal turn. All the time I spent learning Mandarin, I would have been better off learning Hindi. Maybe I'll have to pay attention to all the marketing by Rosetta Stone after all. But it is true that in my industry I meet a whole lot more Indians than Chinese - therein lies an apparent contradiction, because over the past six months I have been particularly angry at Indians. Why? Because of their body shops and staff augmentation and outsourcing. It's an odd way to view a people, but then again, those are 80% of the Indians that I communicate with. The new Rolta officers (the Yanks among them) spent a fair amount of face time assuring us that Rolta is different. I buy it, and not only out of necessity. Nuclear engineering is nuclear engineering. I'm reaching the Holy Grail.

Rolta is a new breed of company that understands that there is mastery in service. Perhaps the Hindi translation of 'The Power of Empowerment' doesn't sound so ironically corny, but think about it for a moment. Digitization of knowledge and making it rapid is where the new productivity is going to come from, for centuries. It should be obvious but it isn't. More on that later.

There has always been, in the back of my head, three magically symbolic places which represent to me a sort of excellence I would love to experience. The first is the Philosophy department at Harvard. The second is some IT department at Goldman Sachs or Bloomberg. The third is any nuclear facility employing a Swearingen Seal. This magical intellectual triangle defines part of my ultimate career 'thing', not that I've pursued it forcefully. But approaching all those from different directions, I think I'm doing OK. In BPM, there is this irony. Companies that haven't already thought about their future aren't likely to make investments in the IT for managing it, we consultants arrive at the moment of change - when we're lucky. Sure Northeast Utilities had regulatory requirements to INPO that made monitoring of hundreds of metrics a necessity, we didn't have to convince them that KPIs were an advantage. The smarter the business, the more they understand that. So what have I been doing at joints like S, K and U all these years? Biding my time, perhaps. Now it's time for big multiyear contracts. I'm ready.

Hooking up with Kevin Ross has raised my profile significantly, and so now I have three new political entities to deal with. The first is Ross himself, who is a whirlwind of energy exploding in several different directions at once. I cannot plumb all those, but he's sure to strike gold, or stub his toe, one. Either way, one can never have enough political allies. The second is Boston Patriot who I'm proud to drop a name one - she's interviewed John Bolton. Of the many folks I've met who comprise this new media, she is the one whom I sense goes towards the deepest principles. I find it very attractive that she's what I consider a true Constitutional Nationalist - it's an important distinction that often gets blithely overlooked or casually assumed in blather about the Second Amendment or Abortion. The way I see it, there is something implacably fundamental about what America means to the West and how our Constitution has provided a backbone of liberty for us and for others. These two are nominees for the Conservative Brotherhood, because I just said so.

On the heels of Boston Patriot's nomination, the Grizzly Groundswell's head honcho gave me a call last week. l must confess that I've been too swept up by this merger to pay quite enough attention, but when I checked out their website, it was love at first sight.

Well now it's almost Summer Vacation time, meaning my family is in several different states. Usually this is a great time for me because the house becomes mine. No such luck. I'm working in Ohio and the Spousal Unit and the girls are in Detroit and Boy is usually in Brooklyn or Bermuda or with the Scouts somewheres. We're trying to get to be 100% family this time in Washington DC which should be a great trip if the temperature stays in the 80s (yeah right). But I'm looking forward to that new logicstical nightmare bearing down on my quickly - like Thursday. I'm flying in, they're driving in, we meet at a place to be determined near a cousin yet to be named. Plus I'm trying to hookup with Tooley and some other of my e-pen pals. Oh the chaos.

Speaking of hookups. It turns out that people I haven't seen since college have found pictures of me during college, which are in fact very rare. There is a rumor that before I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha that my hairstyle was reminiscent of Jessie Johnson. I can neither confirm nor deny such rumors, and would only defer to proof admissible in a court of law. That being the case, it's great fun to see old frat online.

It turns out that Moms has decided to move to Ohio. There is no stopping this woman and I've long stopped trying to predict where she would be doing what next. Last time I checked, she was in the most luxurious trailer park I'd ever seen, assisting a sweetheart of an old man who became paralyzed as the result of an act of heroism. Her new mission I don't know, but it's just another person to keep in the loop. Funny we think of old Jewish and Italian mothers who nag us about not calling on the telephone. My mother reads my blog. Perhaps we should follow each other on Twitter. I can already see the Spousal Unit asking our kids, "What, you can't IM, you can't Tweet?"

Finally, I think I'm giving up Eddie Bauer for Johnston & Murphy. Eddie Bauer is so... Seattle and Microsofty.