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Dad, you should know more
One day at home I was trying to get a new SoundBlaster audio card working in
my PC. For a variety of technical reasons that I won’t go into here it was proving
to be quite difficult. It had to do with deep technical parameters that most people
don’t know exist (and shouldn’t have to). I got myself totally confused and
frustrated trying to get the parameters set properly. To my great relief my son
Aaron arrived home from school. He was 15 at the time. I told him the problem.
He walked over to my PC and in about 15 seconds had everything working. After
I thanked him, Aaron said, “You know Dad, for someone at your level in IBM, you
should really know more about PCs”. The kids wonder why we think technology
is so hard. I want to know less. He thought I should know more. He thought it
would be normal to know more.
Visiting colleges and universities is a great way to learn what is going on today
and more importantly where things are headed. Occasionally I get an invitation
to visit a campus and speak about the Future of the Internet. One summer I
visited Lehigh University (my alma mater) and spoke at a combined session of
the ACM and IEEE membership – a very technical audience. I asked how many
were writing Java programs and all the hands went up. This became an
important proof point for me as skeptics about Java emerged. Professor Ron
LaPorte of the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania invited me to
visit the College of Epidemiology. Ron is leading a terrific project called the
Global Health Network. I got the chance to meet some wonderful and creative
graduate students who are collaborating to improve the health of the world.
During this visit I learned how non-technical people were getting as much out of
the Internet as the technical people I was used to spending time with. A visit to
The J L Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University
was nostalgic since I had attended their executive program some years ago.
More importantly I got to meet with a group of students and hear their questions
during an extended Q&A session. They stimulated my thinking about where
things are going. Similar sessions at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and
Stanford have inspired me greatly. There is no formal training program or
company experience that can compare with an hour of Q&A with bright students
– they ask questions that really make you think. When I leave one of these
sessions I always feel that I have gained at least as much as they have. I tell
them they are the most fortunate graduating class in many years because they
are about to enter a networked world of e-business and they can be the technical
and business entrepreneurs who can help create it.
What is normal?
What we consider esoteric or even bizarre our kids consider normal. When we
think of an insurance agent we think of a person. They think of a Java applet that
runs on the Internet finding the optimum deal for insurance coverage. When we
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