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Ice I Field Trip on Mt. Baker

Ice I is where the Seattle Mountaineers’ Intermediate Course first addresses ice climbing. I’ve top-roped water ice many years ago in the Adirondacks and New Hampshire, and did some alpine-style ice climbing in Wyoming during my NOLS trip, but this was the first time climbing ice here in Washington.

I’m not devoted enough to ice climbing to buy modern, bent-shaft ice tools. Particularly for around here, there’s just not really any water ice where they’d be necessary. The ice we do have is usually on glaciers and is rarely vertical for more than a few feet. Thus I bought a used straight-shaft ice tool from a buddy and decided to use my normal ice axe as my second tool.

The problem is that an ice axe really just doesn’t work for climbing anything approaching vertical – it is just too long, and the head is too light to get a good placement without a lot of work. My new tool, however, worked wonders – it went in really easily and felt solid each time. I actually liked it more than some of the bent-shaft tools I tried, but the price you pay is sometimes crushing your fingers against the ice. Also, the thing weighs a ton. But if I knew I was going to be encountering steep ice, I’d probably opt to bring two such tools, since you can still self-arrest with them as with a normal ice axe (though I’ve never tried this).

It was sunny that day on Baker, so we were continuously having to check the screws. Because ice screws are metal and conduct heat, they have a tendency to melt out the underlying ice if the sun hits them, compromising their security. I borrowed some of the old style Russian titanium screws – although some climbers swear by them because they’re so light, I found them to be a bit of a pain since they don’t have the modern rotating knob that makes placing modern ice screws so fast and easy.

We also practiced making V-threads. I had a bit of trouble with this, as I several times couldn’t get the holes I drilled in the ice to meet up. I think V-threads are a bit scary – I’d always want to back them up with screws on a rappel and have the lightest person (most likely not me!) pull the screws and go down solely on the V-thread.

One of the best parts of being on alpine ice is the beautiful shapes and sculptures that the water, wind, and sun carve out. Often, these form rivers in the glacier that are like waterslides. Other times the water flows deeper into the glacier and makes big caverns (indeed, one of the guys dropped a carabiner down one by accident…they’ll probably find that a few centuries from now when the glacier recedes up the mountain).

So I’m fine climbing on steeper ice, but I still have no real desire to do sport-style vertical ice climbing. It’s just not something that really interests me – besides, ice climbing packs are really heavy!

The photos are courtesy of Michael Rosenthal, who I now know drops gear both on rock and ice routes…

Mt. Baker Ice I Field Trip

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Seafair – My First Triathlon

I’ve been wanting to get into triathlons since moving to Washington. I’ve been a runner for many years – I started regularly running my freshman year of college to burn off some extra energy and stress that accumulated during school, and I haven’t stopped since (except for stints in Nigeria and China when I felt running might be more harmful to my health than helpful). I’ve run three marathons so far, and have kept up a three to four run per week schedule for most of my adult life.  Running is a great sport for New York City, where the logistics of cycling, hiking, and climbing are way more involved than here in Seattle. And unlike many other sports, you don’t need really any special gear to run, so it’s one of the cheapest ways to stay fit.

But over the years, running got monotonous. In New York I started to vary it by mixing up my slow long runs with intervals and shorter anarobic stuff. But still I was feeling a bit bored by it. So when we moved to Washington, I bought a bike and joined the Bainbridge Island Master Swimmers. I’ve kept up my running but have added regular swim and biking workouts as well.

I’m also a generalist and like the challenge of being proficient at a number of different things more than the idea of becoming an expert at one. So for all these reasons, triathlon really appealed to me. I didn’t do any races last year, but this year decided to bite the bullet and just sign up for a few. I wanted to start with a sprint-distance race since I felt I could compete in this without really changing my existing workout schedule too much or really ramping up my training to the point of sacrificing other stuff that I like doing.

The Seafair triathlon is one of the best supported local races – it’s very well organized and is convenient to get to from Bainbridge Island. I read up a bit on racing triathlons, but really just jumped right in, not worrying at all about messing up (wait…which sport comes first?) or what my times were.

Seafair is a .5 mile swim, a 12 mile bike, and a 5K. I didn’t get any fancy equipment – I used my normal road bike, my old worn-out running shoes (essentially barefoot running by this point), and my surfing wetsuit. The day of the race I put all my gear in a big backpack, parked the car, and just rode down to the transition area. I essentially just watched how other people got set up and copied them.

When my wave was up to start, I got out into the water – it turns out I wasn’t the only first-timer there…at least three other people I was chatting with were first time racers as well!

The swim leg went fine – it was a bit more chaotic than I’d anticipated, with people bumping into each other, my goggles flooding or fogging up, getting tossed about in the chop, and trying to navigate the course without zig-zagging to much. I didn’t really try to hold much back since this was a sprint, but I also wasn’t really at all concerned about what the bulk of the other swimmers were doing.

My first surprise of the race was how dizzy I got after I got out of the water. I’ve since learned that this is pretty common coming off the swim leg. But as I was putting on my cycling shoes, I had to grab on to the bar to keep from falling over – not a great condition to start riding a bike! Fortunately, this passed very quickly and I was on my way.  It’s a strange sensation to jump on a bike seconds after getting out of the water – I was still dripping wet and in my tri-shorts and racing top, wearing less and feeling more exposed than any other time on the bike. The bike leg was certainly my weakest. I felt like I was being passed much more frequently than I was passing. But because the olympic distance race and the various age groups get all mixed up on the course, it was hard to know whether any given athlete actually started in my wave, so that takes a lot of the pressure off.

Triathlon is also a comparatively solitary test – there’s no peloton of the sort that forms in bike road races and on the running leg people are all strung out over a big distance. So it’s really just you and whatever sport you happen to be doing at that moment.

My second surprise was how difficult it was to transition from cycling to running. As soon as I started out, my legs felt rubbery and heavy – like I was completely out of shape and trying to do something my body was really not used to. The way to avoid this is through brick workouts – combined bike-run and swim-bike workouts that get your body accustomed to the transition. Of course, being as unprepared as I was, I’d never done any of these! Looking at the splits after the race was over, I actually had been running quite a bit faster than what it felt like at the time.

The great thing about triathlon is that you can do it your entire life. I think sports like track, cross-country, cycling, swimming, and tennis should be emphasized much, much more in school, since those are the sports people can do long term. You don’t see many football or baseball players after college! Looking at the age variance in the results, you see a wide range – from teenagers to those in their 60s and up, all competing on the same course in the same event. Like running, triathlon is one of those sports where amateurs can compete in the exact same event as professionals and those competing at world-class levels.

Finally, triathlon is neophyte-friendly. People are really supportive, whether you’re a seasoned and highly-competitive athlete or a newcomer to the sport.

Colchuck Peak

Last year I took the Basic Climbing Course with the Seattle Mountaineers. As part of the course, we all were divided up into “Small Instructional Groups” (SIGs) under the leadership of two experienced climbers. I’d intended to join up with the Mountaineers even before we moved to Washington, so I was pretty excited to get to take the course only shortly after we arrived. Your experience in the course is largely determined by which SIG you’re assigned to, as the leaders and other SIG members are the ones you have most contact with. I was first assigned to a SIG group meeting out in Kirkland, a good hour-long trip from Bainbridge. After noting that this probably wasn’t the most logical matching, by sheer serendipity I landed in the SIG group of Cebe Wallace and Mike Warren – as far as I’m concerned the best SIG group the Mountaineers has ever seen!

Aside from having two immensely experienced, patient, and fun leaders, our group was made up entirely of strong, enthusiastic climbers. In many cases, the SIG members themselves had significant mountaineering experience, and so the group came together very quickly. It was actually quite a sad day when the course was over – fortunately, many of us continued on into the Intermediate Climbing Course, and the others I still often see on trips. But to relive a bit of all the fun we had last year, Mike and Cebe organized a reunion climb this spring up Colchuck Peak.

The approach to Colchuck is off of Icicle Creek Road, the main climbing route out of Leavenworth. We bivvied out at the trailhead (I was outside and got rained on quite a bit) and got up early for a 5 AM start. Doing Colchuck in a day is a long (5000′ plus) day, taking a good 12 hours to complete. We hiked first up to Colchuck Lake and then ascended a snow gully to the col between Dragontail and Colchuck peaks. From there, it’s a scramble up snow and rock to the top.

Like every mountaineering trip I’ve ever been on, it’s long, hard, and goes on farther than I think it will. I was a bit nervous about the avalanche risk, since it was a hot day in the relatively early season, but whatever was going to slide on the route we went up had already slid, and the opinions of our several exceedingly experienced folks was that there was really minimal risk.

It was a purely fun climb – good folks, great weather, and no unpleasant surprises. Ascending that long snow gully is a slog, but the views from the col are spectacular. Looking out from the summit you can see all the neighboring peaks, including the formidable Stuart, Dragontail, and down to Colchuck Lake far, far below.

Photos are courtesy of Mike Warren. Mike has an extensive gallery of very fine work at Mountain Groove Photography.

Colchuck Peak

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Mt. Constitution

Orcas Island is surely one of the most magically picturesque places in the world. Here are some photos from a one-day hike we did there.

Mt. Constitution Trip

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Rampart Ridge Snowshoe

This was a snowshoe conditioner around Rampart Ridge starting from the Longmire Museum at Mt. Rainier.   It snowed the entire time – big fluffy flakes mostly. The avalanche conditions that day were worrisome, so we were careful to stay around any exposed slopes.

We helped the students learn self-arrest, but the problem with training in such soft snow is that it’s too easy to stop – it doesn’t give you the experience of what it would be like if you really needed to self-arrest. Hard to find those conditions, though, in a safe environment with good run-out.

Mailbox Peak

The infamous Mailbox Peak is one of the Seattle area’s best conditioning hikes. Used as preparation for Rainier or other big mountains, Mailbox has several thousand feet of elevation gain in a very short horizontal distance. It is listed in the Snoqualmie Region hiking guide as the hardest hike in the book.

I’ve known people to go up it in about 1:35, but we went slower than that. I’ve again been convinced of the usefulness of the Clif DoubleShot Espresso gels – one of these every two hours or so really makes a difference! Photos are courtesy of Angus Speirs.

Mt. Si Conditioner

Enjoyable conditioner just before Mt. Si was closed due to a plane crash.  It was clear at the top but very gusty – a strong gust would just blow you over.  It was a bit icy at the top, so we put on crampons.  I was sore for 5 days after this trip!

How Much Legal Work Will Computers Replace?

Not much. But how much scrivener work will computers replace? Almost all.

It turns out we’re doing more and more shadow work as time goes on: we scan our own groceries, we locate books at Barnes & Nobel by punching them into a computer, we pump our own gas, we do much of our own personal banking and investing without ever talking to a human, we do our own check-in at the airport. Routine services all around us are being replaced by technology. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I feel more comfortable interacting directly with the system than having a person intermediate. And I’d rather just log into a web page to handle my business directly than wait on hold trying to connect to a customer representative – I get frustrated if I need to call someone to resolve an issue and usually find it faster to figure it out myself.

It was the same way for me practicing law. I rarely utilized my assistant – most of the time I did my own time sheets, filed my own expense reports, edited my own documents and booked my own conference rooms. Our system had made these tasks so simple that it was actually faster for me to handle these things myself than to outsource them. These administrative tasks historically were performed by people but have largely been replaced by computers.

Technology will continue to move higher up the value chain, making workers more and more productive (whether or not you feel this is a good thing – and it’s certainly debatable – the trend isn’t reversing itself anytime soon).

In the law, the next frontier is what I call the scrivener work – locating, categorizing and comparing language (both case law and contractual text). This is largely hunt-and-seek work: finding precedents, summarizing contracts and comparing language. Because the technology to handle this hasn’t previously existed, up to now it has been done largely by lawyers themselves. But it has started to take an oppressive amount of time to handle – it’s a problem both for lawyers who get bogged down by scrivener work and for clients who pay high-value workers to handle lower-value tasks.

Scrivener work is distinct from legal work. Legal work is what you went to law school to learn – advising clients on risks, opining on the legality of a proposed action, distilling experience and precedent into actionable recommendations and of course drafting and negotiating documents. But the legal work is increasingly crowded out by the scrivener work.

This phenomenon has already played out in discovery – in any sizable case, it is no longer remotely realistic to have high-priced attorneys manually reviewing each document. Discovery materials are now segmented into different categories for different levels of review: (i) the critical information, which must be reviewed by experienced attorneys, (ii) relevant but not crucial information, which can be reviewed and summarized by more inexperienced attorneys and (iii) everything else. eDiscovery software makes this segmentation possible.

Similarly, the scrivener work in corporate practice will soon be replaced by computers. It will be much easier to find precedents, assemble standard agreements and pinpoint missing or unacceptable provisions in a set of complex documents. Lawyers should view this as a good thing – it allows them to focus on the higher-value tasks (which also happen to be more professionally fulfilling) and provide their services more efficiently.

So the real question is what the adoption curve will look like. Law firms are notorious for still using Windows XP and Office 2003. But ultimately client demands drive adoption – not only in the form of alternative fee arrangements and push-back on billable rates, but also in terms of business development: the firms that can best demonstrate technological efficiency to their clients will gain marketshare. And firms will face increasing pressure from legal outsourcing, both from South Asia and low-cost jurisdictions in the US. The adoption of this technology will mirror that of eDiscovery – the pain becomes so acute, it forms a completely new category of technology (and its own neologism) in just a few years.

For younger attorneys, this is a big opportunity. Being able to understand and leverage technology is becoming a real way of differentiating yourself in an increasingly competitive job market. When I started at my firm, nobody asked me whether I knew how to use Windows, Microsoft Word and Westlaw – it was assumed. In my day, attorneys who were adept with Excel and PowerPoint were ahead of the curve. In the future, using next generation tools to perform more efficiently and produce higher quality work will be a big advantage. For those attorneys that embrace these technologies, it will also make practicing law more fun.

Fail Early, Fail Often

I’m tired of people saying don’t be afraid of failure. Fear is an emotional response – you may as well tell someone not to be sad if his pet dies or not to be angry if someone bumps his car. Fear is part of being human. Sure, some people experience these things more acutely than others, but everyone – even a tough, serial entrepreneur – feels something.

Of course entrepreneurs fear failure. There’s just no way to avoid that – the challenge rather is to manage that fear so that it doesn’t have the perverse effect of making the big failures more likely.

When I started GreenLine, I had an acute fear of failure. I left a secure, well-paying job that most of my peers were steadily advancing in. So my reaction was to shrink from this fear by postponing the day of reconing far off into the future – either I’d run out of discretionary savings and would have to go back to working for someone else, or I’d be generating good cash flows. Success or failure would happen at that point rather than at numerous small points along the way. It was the exact opposite attitude that I should have been taking.

In hindsight, I should have embraced the doctrine of Fail Early, Fail Often. This is not the Silicone Valley saying “Fail Fast”, meaning your entire venture should either crash or be airborne in a short period of time (which Mark Suster persuasively dismisses), but rather the idea that I’d set a series of concrete goals that were testable within a reasonable period of time.

This may sound obvious to more seasoned entrepreneurs and executives, but for me it was a real revelation. As Eric Ries argues, if you just build something and put it out there to see what happens, you’ll always succeed – in seeing what happens! But entrepreneurs, who deal with staggering numbers of unknowns, must embrace the scientific method in their strategy – set a clear, disprovable hypothesis and test it in a way that ensures success or failure. Without this, there can be no real learning and without learning there can be no real progress. Sure, you might get lucky or might internalize this process in an informal way, but neither of those things are viable recipes for actually running a business.

For the product-focused tech geek (like myself), this is easy in terms of metrics (cohort analyses, revenue targets, etc.), but is much harder when you get to the human side of things – to actually talking to customers. The reason is two-fold:

First, there’s confirmation bias – you’re likely to attach more weight to data that confirms what you already believe. If you’ve built a product, you think it creates value, so every scrap of data from customer conversations that confirms this will stick out in your mind. I think a lot of entrepreneurs crash and burn on this point – you conclude way too early that you know which product to build and which customer to sell to. Fight this bias! Savor criticism. Love it – embrace it. Put it up on your wall and ruminate over it, not to the point of beating yourself up or getting discouraged, but just enough to counteract the tendency to hear only what you want to believe. Your customers just told you something very valuable.

Second, most people don’t press hard enough to get past the polite BS that you usually receive. Good entrepreneurs, like good journalists, will press much farther than you’d go in a friendly dinner conversation. It’s easy to hear “This is really cool – everyone will be using it in a few years” and stop at that point. Great for team morale, but it doesn’t mean squat. Early on, we got a lot of these messages, but drilling down, it always turned out we had the perfect product for somebody else – never for the person we were actually trying to sell to. You need to (politely) press much, much further. Would you buy it now? Do you have the budget for the sticker price? How much would you pay? How often would you use it? How much value does it provide? Would you recommend it to a colleague or friend? How much time/money does it save? I have a hell of a time actually doing this – both because hearing criticism is unpleasant (let’s be candid here) and because I don’t want to make a potential customer uncomfortable. People also tend to be polite rather than honest (this tendency is in direct proportion with your geographical distance from New York City). If you don’t press, you’re avoiding your fears of failure instead of confronting them.

So the moral of the story is to manage your fears through pure habituation. Fail early, fail often. Set long term big goals and then work backwards to the present until you have a set of small, easy-to-test hypotheses. Each hypothesis should have a binary outcome – success or failure – in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re not failing pretty frequently, you’re either an entrepreneurial demigod or (more likely) you’re not being ambitious or honest enough with yourself. Savor the failures. Share them with your friends and family to help desensitize you. But most importantly, learn from each one. Learn why your experiment failed and take corrective action. Adjust future hypotheses if necessary. But don’t just run from these little failures – doing so makes the big failures an order of magnitude more likely.

Photo credit: Hirz/Getty Images

* Interesting story about St. Sebastian (the woeful looking fellow depicted in Andrea Mantegna’s painting above) – once a Praetorian Guard of Diocletian, he encouraged two imprisoned brothers in their faith and, despite being shot many times by archers as punishment, he pulled through (“‘Tis only a flesh wound!”) and was nursed back to health. Ever persistent, he then harangued Diocletian, was clubbed to death and thrown down a toilet. I visited Diocletian’s palace in 1999, located in present-day Split, Croatia.

Why Does Knowledge Need To Be Managed?

Why is Google’s famous slogan “organizing the world’s information” rather than managing the world’s information? If managing something means controlling it, knowledge management is really about controlling information.  But isn’t that like saying we need to control the internet? The producers of information will always win – in the long run, there’s just no way you can hope to control all the data that people create.

An early knowledge manager grapples with data from the Venerable Bede 

In the early days of the internet, several companies tried to categorize all the web pages out there into a giant index. If you wanted to buy a car, you might click on the “Automobile” category, then the “Consumer Reports” or “Dealerships” categories and browse through the various listings, which were of widely varying quality. But this task of indexing and categorizing the internet quickly proved entirely unworkable – there were simply too many pages out there, there were more going live every day, and a mere index could not tell you which of those millions of pages were actually worth looking at.

Companies are now facing this same challenge in microcosm.  Information is exploding – in emails, documents, archives and even voice mails. We’re become shockingly adept both at producing new information and recording it.

So why should companies take the same approach as those early internet portals?

The only feasible alternative is “Knowledge Organization” rather than “Knowledge Management” – companies need an internal Google to allow the consumers of information to consume it in the way they want, rather than being forced into a particular framework that works for one point in time and for one type of user.

This problem comes up in spades with Contract Management Software (an unfortunate name, usually abbreviated as CMS). Every company beyond a certain size needs to come up with a process for tracking its agreements. This is a huge problem – without some way of handling this, deadlines are missed, cost-savings opportunities are lost, and even worse, agreements might be unwittingly breached. The current solution is to use software that imposes such a process. But producers of legal text, consumers of it and managers of the system are forced into a framework that the software designer thought would work. And it does work, so long as you have enough people willing to manage all this contractual data and so long as those people buy into the software’s way of doing things.

But in the long run, it won’t scale. For one thing, producers of information have a limited tolerance for entering meta-data. This drove me crazy in my law practice, where it seemed you couldn’t open or save a document without spending 10 minutes filling out a form. Patience for doing this just won’t last. I’ve heard of situations where a law firm knowledge manager would actually bribe attorneys with Starbucks cards to get them to fill out the forms. The costs of managing all this information increases rapidly with its volume. Worse, as we continue to get better at producing and recording information (think social media), this problem grows in a non-linear (read: scary-fast) way.

Hard day at work today? Actually, work was fine – it’s the meta-work that’s killing me! (Photo by Fred Fehl)

We need a Google for contracts – something that organizes the information without trying to control it. Imagine typing in a query like, “Leases needing to be renewed in the next six months,” and having the software give you a list of hits, with the relevant language from each agreement at your fingertips.

The cost savings such a service provides would be staggering. It would dramatically reduce the need for manual review of these agreements (especially if delegated to outside counsel) and neither the producers nor consumers of the information would need to slow down their work to deal with meta-data.

If all this sounds futuristic, it’s actually quite easy to envision. Technology to parse and recognize text has advanced dramatically over the last ten years, thanks in large part to eDiscovery. When it comes to legal language, particularly form contract legal language, the challenge of recognizing and extracting the desired provisions becomes quite manageable.

So what’s needed is a computer that can understand a Google-like query to find the relevant provisions among a company’s contracts. Not necessarily a computer to actually understand the language, but simply to locate it (Google doesn’t understand the hits it generates, it just finds them for you). That’s the next generation of legal tech – on the horizon now but rapidly coming into view.