Personal

 by Brendon J. Wilson

The Tyranny of Atoms

My buddy Kevin is lamenting moving his cache of dead-tree technology to his new apartment. I don’t blame him. When we moved down here, I was in the same position – why the hell did I have so many books? Especially so many books that I would never read again. Come to think of it, why was I moving anything at all?

We live in a world where Henry Ford’s mass-production legacy enables me to buy the same book in Mountain View that I bought in Vancouver. Not just a similar book, the same book. Ditto the clothes at from the Gap. And the IKEA furniture. And the personal electronics. With the exception of some personal effects, there’s really no reason that I couldn’t have simply sold everything in Vancouver and bought it all anew once we arrived in Mountain View. Except, of course, for the fact that it would have been a pain in the ass, and my company wouldn’t have reimbursed me for the “move”; after all, I wouldn’t have really moved anything!

As a society, we’re really addicted to shipping a lot of atoms around. Look at us – we ship water halfway around the world, simply because it’s from another country, and contains a few different dissolved minerals. How insane is that?

Travel is another area where we ship a lot of stuff. If we were really smart, there would be a service that you could request along with your plane ticket that would provide you with clothes at your destination. After all, is that pair of Dockers you’re going to need for the business meeting really that unique?

Methinks there’s an opportunity here for eBay or AuctionDrop to enable people to easily arrange to swap identical items to facilitate moves from one city to another.

in Opinion / Personal 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

WWPFD?

Yesterday, I received a note from Perry, the former MBAS President for my year at the Sauder School of Business.

It is with great sadness that I inform you that Peter Frost passed away at 3:00 AM on Monday morning. This was Peter’s third fight against cancer – he was apparently comfortable and attended by his family at the end.

Perry

Peter Frost Action FigurePeter Frost was my favourite professor during the MBA. He projected an aura of calm at all times; he had a genuine gift to draw out the best in people; and he’s the only professor I know that was cool enough to warrant his own action figure (“With Kung-Fu grip and toxic handling action!!!”)

Peter specialized in handling organizational “toxins” – the hurt and pain that people experience during the toil and grind of their careers. He trained managers to act as “toxin handlers” to prevent, when possible, and consume, when necessary, organizational pain to help people achieve their best results.

The effect of Peter’s classes on me was always dramatic. I always came out of Peter’s classes with a sense that I could do better – it’s as if the very essence of Peter’s being were some form of airborne psychoactive virus. You couldn’t help but come out of his classes infected by Peter. For me, the infection took my black-and-white view of the world (informed by the lens of my engineering training) and smeared the colours together. Unfortunately, this effect was only temporary – eventually my engineering immune system reasserted itself, and flushed the virus until the next class re-infected me with a new mutant strain.

More recently, I’ve found myself trying to remember how Peter would look at a situation, and asking myself to inspect people’s emotions and motivations more closely. Written in the back of my lab book, I have a set of questions that serve to remind me to focus on the core issues: What are we trying to accomplish? Why do you ask? I realize that I forgot to add one question that I found myself asking during the MBA: What would Peter Frost do?

Tomorrow I will add that question to my list.

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