Closer, closer . . .
Dateline: stuck in Midway, wondering why anyone with a brain would ever want to connect through Chicago, 12 August 2005
Pretty amazing couple of days getting to know the staff of Enterra Solutions, and coming to grips with the verbal and intellectual Tasmanian devil that is Steve DeAngelis, their unconsciously charismatic leader. Being a big guy, you get him spinning and he sends the room and everyone in it spinning as well, and it's pretty to cool to experience.
What Steve's doing with Enterra is really amazing: simultaneously ramping up a start-up company while almost single-handedly plowing ahead on thought leadership in an emergent field that defies simple description and yet will define the next great wave of business change management in both America and the world. Enterprise resiliency will constitute the great private-sector response to the challenges we now recognize are posed by post-9/ll globalization and its fellow traveler, the global war on terrorism, and helping Steve realize that positive vision has The New Rule Sets Project awfully jacked up-all three of us.
Okay, so it's a small committee to actually save the world, so it only makes sense we ally ourselves with as much top talent as we can.
As always, security leads, but markets and innovation do the heavy lifting over the long haul, and Enterra is looking like a world-class weight-lifter in the world of rule sets. I have found my next Cebrowski, my new north star, and DeAngelis plays against type just as much or more than the Delphic admiral: where Art would dazzle you with one dense sentence that would lay on your brain for days, Steve will bury you with a blizzard of ideas and images that blanket your senses, muffling all distractions until you can see as far as he can. But the effect is the same: you find yourself won over by the obvious mastery of the material and the underlying sense of intense passion.
The logic centers, but the passion connects. I like to know where I am, but I love knowing where I'm going even more. I'm living in Indiana, but I'm racing to the future worth creating with a gang of like-minded individuals convinced that we can change the world.
I can't wait to get up in the morning and get started.
Here's the daily catch:
■ The need to see progress/failure in Iraq■ The need to see progress/failure in China
■ A broken personnel system in DoD