cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. and Diane Cluff.
"We designed Continuum Resources around the concept of collaboration. Great concept, and it has not worked. The little dictionary says to collaborate is `to work jointly with others (as in writing a book).'
Monday morning at our sales staff meeting, it was obvious how little we are working jointly to build our company. Jeff was so frustrated with the lack of knowledge about what is going on in Perth and London he stood up and angerly stated `This is a waste of my time. I am leaving, and I don't want to be in a meeting like this again.' And he left. It was good for each of us to realize we were acting like a big company, even though we have no revenues coming in to pay for the overhead of a big company. We need to be working together, focused, and collaborating.
Monday afternoon the idea team met to review technologies Continuum is working on. We have about 60 different projects or potential projects. Dave Monk, Chief Technical Officer, Peter Duncan, VP Services, and myself are responsible for selecting which will be pursued. We got together briefly last week and made the decision to put the stratal- slice technology on hold. This meeting was a continuation of cut and slash the list. It was a good, almost collaborative session, and as I recall the list of 60 different active projects is now about 10. Monday evening Andrea did the Family Home Evening lesson. Matt collaborated, getting us to play hide-and-go-seek for the activity.
Tuesday morning started at 7:00 with a meeting with Stuart Jackson, the new `CoRe Explorer' product line manager. We were working on the functional specification for our visualization software solution. Collaboration continued at 9:00 with a meeting with Steve Slawson and Pete Worshnop about the presentation being made at the Rural Development Conference at SUU in a week. At 10:20 I met Andrea at Beck Junior High School for a meeting with what we thought was one of Matt's teachers. However, when we walked into the room, there were 6 teachers, and it was immediately obvious they were collaborating. They went around the room talking about how Matt is doing, basically saying he has not been doing his homework and is having a hard time concentrating in each of his classes. It was my first experience with this type of intervention, and both Andrea and I felt like it was very positive. They have agreed to make sure his assignments are written down in his day planner each day, with each teacher signing off that he has written it down, and we are to sign off that we have seen it each night. It is wonderful what can be accomplished to help the individual when a team works together for a common purpose. I went from Beck to Guadalahara's for a working lunch with Roger Anderson and Gary Crouse. The three of us do a great job of collaborating. It is just too bad we do not have cash to implement our ideas. Oh well!
Wednesday morning we had a collaboration teleconference with Rick Duran in Chicago and Jeff Winston in Boulder laying out the basics for the presentation at SUU. This project is really exciting to me. I hope the presentation turns out half as nice as what we have been talking about. I went from this phone call to a meeting Gary Crouse sat up to talk about how Continuum can collaborate with HARC (Houston Area Research Council based in The Woodlands). Four of us went to lunch and talked about the next logical steps. There are sure a lot of exciting possibilities. Then before leaving for home, several of us got together to prepare for a presentation to a large independent oil company called EEX Thursday morning. I met Rob at `Happy Town' (a Chinese restruant) and we collaborated about how we can do more things together. We went from there to the church, where I met Andrea and we had a meeting with Bishop Camp and he issued her a new calling. Church organization can be the highth of organizational collaboration.
Thursday the Continuum officers had a strategy meeting at the Westside Marriott. Jeff has been working up a strategy document, and this meeting was to make sure everyone is on the same page. It was a good meeting, and exciting. I had to leave at 8:50 for the 9:00 AM demonstration for EEX. It was wonderful. We had the four senior officers. After the demo I asked the President, Tom Hamilton, and Chief Operating Officer, Dave Henderson, (both of whom live in Green Trails Estates) if they would be interested in tieing up the Houston Continuum Center full time or even half time for their own work. Dave asked us to prepare a proposal for using the center half time for the next six months. Needless to say I was higher than a kite. Then I went upstairs and ended up spending 45 minutes on the phone with Gazelle Smith, a news reporter for ABCnews.com out of Seattle. I ended up missing about 1 1/2 hours of the strategy meeting. In order to lighten the strategy meeting collaboration, I talked Peter Duncan into helping me sing a song I had written at last year's SEG Convention about Continuum's customers and products. The tune is to `The First Prayer' and the words were written out in Thoughtlet 9838.html.
Thursday evening was one of the highlights of my year. Matt Feil, who is a little older than Roice and was one of my Scouts back in the early 1980's, called and told me he is in the Sunday School Presidency and wondered if I would substitute for course 15 on Sunday. I told him I would be glad to, and how wonderful it was to have him call me up and ask me to do this. I could tell he was touched by my sincerity. When Matt left home he grew his hair out, dropped out of school, married and divorced, then after several years got re-engaged in the church, came home, married Tiffiny Jones, and is going to school and lives in our ward. When he came over to the house to bring me the class manual Matt was beaming. Andrea and I met him at the the door. He said, `Do you remember this shirt?' I told Andrea how I had bought all of the boys in my Priest Quorum a shirt when I was in Indonesia. Back when I was in High School I did a similar thing and bought everyone in The KeyNotes a plaid shirt, which we wore to play for dances for a couple of years. Matt said, `Yes, and we all wore the shirts to pass the sacrament one Fast Sunday.' I didn't remember that, and maybe I wasn't the example I thought I was. It reminded me of a post card I sent to Matt when he was the Quorum President from Cannes, France. (For years when I was travelling so much for Landmark, I would send Post Cards to all of the kids I worked with when I wasn't at church on Sunday.) This card was of a sand sculpture of a naked woman, and I recall writing something like, `Matt, you are growing up and are going to be exposed to a lot of garbage like this in the world. Like Brigham Young wrote to one of his sons, if you want to learn about the seedy side of life, simply stay close to the church and to honor your priesthood callings and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know.' He didn't remember the card, and he didn't know that his Mom said that Bishop Feil probably liked the post card better than Matt did. I know for years I felt like I had done or said something that led Matt away from the church. To have him ask me to subsitute for a Sunday School class was a major milestone. It felt so good. And it helped me to realize how much raising kids is a collaborative activity.
Friday morning was the time of real collaboration this week. I got to the office at 6:15 after dropping Rachel off at Seminary. At 7:30 we had a teleconference sales meeting. Jeff laid the Marketing and Sales Vice-President off on Wednesday, and was running the meeting. This sales meeting was as they should have been for months, as we all immediately recognized. Perth Australia stayed up late and met at one of the guys houses at 9:30 PM to participate. It was was 1:30 PM in London, and there were several in the London office on the phone. We are working with several customers that have offices in two of the three places we have offices, and the collaboration in defining what needs to happen to close business was just plain exciting. The phone meeting went until 9:00 AM, ending with the news about EEX. Then we went downstairs to the Visualization Center. We had people from Coherency Technology in both the Houston and London office. The guys had loaded a large seismic volume, coherency volume, and mixed coherency seismic amplitude volume at both sites. We spent about 20 minutes reviewing the data locally, and then we synchronized the two different environments, brining up a craft representing the Houston flyer in the London volume and a craft representing the London flyer in the Houston volume. The London craft had a picture of Marg Simpson on the back of the craft as an identifer. It was a wonderful session, and there was a lot we learned from the various people participating in the same environment. This was the first time Continuum Resources had proven collaboration using our own data in our own centers with a client.
This meeting was followed by a flurry of activity to make sure we knew what EEX wanted, based on some follow-up requests made after the demos on Thursday. Then Dave, Peter, and myself had a follow-up collaborative session on ideas and technology projects. Continuum has already filed for 3 patents. Gary and I left for a lunch with Roger Anderson and the Advisor to the President on Special Projects at Apache Corporation. He was one of Roger's students, and is a really neat guy. He got his PhD in Geophysics at Stanford, worked at Chevron for several years, and just finished getting an MBA at MIT's Sloan Institute. He is very interested in Continuum and the CES company evolver concepts. I got back to the office in time for some phone calls and to participate in the corporate demonstration for Gazelle Smith of ABCnews.com and a couple of others. This was followed by the CoRe Exchange Meeting, where Jeff went over the new organization chart and summarized the strategy meeting. After he talked, Linda Renner gave a great talk about new software Angus Jaimeson has made to optimize multiple platforms in a field. There was a lot of collaborative discussion associated with this presentation. I ended up getting out of the office about 6:30 Friday night. We stayed home with Matt and his friend Patrick.
Saturday morning Andrea and I went for a walk/run around the block. David and Karen Kessler had invited us over for breakfast, and we had this wonderful feast. David talked about his new company plans, and it is time to start working on helping him get his finanicing. When we got back we gave Patrick the opportunity to go home or to stay and collaborate with Matt on his chores. They both rolled up their sleeves and had the chores done in no time at all. Then Rachel joined us and we all went to see the movie `The Iron Giant.' It is really good. I recommend it to each of you. Sherry and Gary Sump stopped by to meet Andrea, and say they were in town for the Swope reception. For those that don't know, Sherry was my first secretary at Walden 3-D, and she worked for me for about 8 years. The day kind of slipped by, and in the evening Andrea and I went to A.J. Swope's reception. He married a girl from Santa Clara, Laruie Ence the daughter of the Santa Clara Stake President, Dr. and Mrs. I. Lee Ence. They know Uncle Arlo, Aunt Ethel, cousin Kristeen Nelson Bybee, Russell Shirts, etc., etc. It was wonderful to see A.J. and to see the choices he is now making. There is a real peace and hope accompanying seeing kids make eternal choices. Especially after having taken them to Philmont a couple of times, like A.J. Then Sherry's Aunt, and Sister Romig's mother, came running up to us and told us that her Granddaughter from Junction, Colorado is rooming with Audrey at SUU. This led to over an hour of conversations. It was a wonderful collaborative evening.
What a small world it is. And how much smaller it is becoming each day as new technologies become available. Hopefully we will work together as a family, in collaboration, to figure out how to help each other over the ravines that cross our life path, and up the mountains which can give us the most joy and happiness both individually and as a group."