2012 has been the year of routine for me so far. I’ve done a good job – reading a lot of fiction - A Happy Marriage, Things Fall Apart, and Cutting For Stone recently - on my commutes through the Nairobi traffic, doing yoga twice a week, running through the nearby arboretum, and even filing my receipts weekly.  As always though, I’m struck by the things that break routine and how they are often so defining.

I took a class at MIT called Managing in Adversity. CEOs from companies came to speak to us about a disastrous situation they faced, then the class debated the best course of action, and then the CEOs told us what happened – almost matter-of-factly. About a month ago, we faced one of those situations. It was Saturday at 9am, and Ani and Lindsay’s plane to South Africa had just taken off. Ruth, our field manager, called to say, “There is a demolition going on in Kwa Njenga and you need to call Bonny [one of our sales reps].” Demolition is a scary word these days for me. Demolishing our toilets demolishes small businesses that people have invested in. It hangs over the people in the communities where we work, but they accept it as a part of life in the slums, where land tenure is unclear and where corruption is commonplace.

I called Bonny, a baby-faced 22-year old who got his job at Sanergy simply because he loved what we were doing so much that he shadowed people on our team until we hired him. He is, by far, the most popular person on our team. Whenever I am out in the field with him, people – tough dudes, old men, pretty girls, you name it - shout greetings. He has me talk to his mom on the phone to say hi, even though she barely speaks English and I assuredly don’t speak Swahili.

Bonny answered the phone, “David – hello. How are you?” In Kenya, even for the briefest of phone calls, people ask how you are doing and expect an answer. “There is a demolition with bulldozers in Kwa Njenga. I am there right now helping people move. 

People are also rioting because there was no warning.” I asked if he was safe and to take photos so we could understand better the situation and let others – our team, our toilet owners, our friends – know. I felt a pang of relief that Bonny was safe and definitely had moved into a mindset of “what does this mean for our business?”

“David, I might not come to work on Monday because I have to move – they will probably demolish my house.” My heart sunk as I contemplated the real consequence of this demolition and how quickly I had overlooked what being safe really meant. Yes, not hurt, but now, everything was up in the air. Bonny’s tone was matter-of-fact. I got the feeling that this had happened before to him.  I let him know that we could help him however he needed.

As it turns out, the extent of the demolition was not that bad. The community stood up for itself citing an out-of-date demolition license (2 years, in fact) and, tragically, because a policeman killed a community member, the government faced a PR disaster. Things have calmed down and, fortunately, Bonny is settled too. For Sanergy, we did not have any toilets in that area, so our business was fine. But still, I carry this experience with me as demonstrable of how things that we talk about in the abstract – land tenure, contract validity – are so important in day-to-day life. And also how managing in adversity is really not a classroom endeavor!

But it hasn’t been that dramatic all the time.

A couple of weeks ago, I went camping for the first time with a few of my guy friends on Mt. Suswa, about two hours outside of Nairobi. We hiked along a Jurassic Park-like crater and went caving into pitch blackness with thousands of bats flying overhead. We checked out another cave – featured on Planet Earth - known as the Baboon Parliament (because baboons sleep there en masse on rocks to avoid prey) with a Masai guide who, much to our delight, kept calling baboons “Bamboos”. We channeled our inner-macho-ness to put together a solid fire made from wood that we chopped ourselves. We also were armed with cheap whiskey called Black Stallion, which comes in at $5 a liter. It’s pretty awful, and in one of those moments that idle camping inspires, we decided to try our hand at fanning the flames through fire-breathing whiskey stunts. Of course, the fire roared with appreciation. But James, our Masai guide who had said nothing all evening, got an even greater kick out of our lunacy, and went way out of his way to outdo the wazungu [foreigners]. Rather than play with whiskey, he whipped out a machete and chopped down an entire tree, which he then heaved into the fire. He watched it burn with an amazing satisfaction long into the night. I have no idea what on Earth what he was thinking, but he enjoyed the campfire as much as we had.

And finally…

About a month ago, Ani went to the bathroom in a Johannesburg restaurant. We sometimes use other toilets than the Sanergy ones. We were there as part of an Echoing Green conference for social entrepreneurs working throughout Africa and we had a private room for the dinner. As he walked, he saw a brown ponytailed woman head into the men’s room. He thought it was Rebecca Magee, a brown ponytailed friend in our cabal. So he shouted, “Quit using the men’s room, Magee!” And he heard back a sharp “What’s the big deal?” which is not unlike Magee to say. So he shrugged his shoulders, and waited, and looked around, and saw that Magee was happily eating at our table. Lo and behold, out walked…Marisa Tomei! 

This has been my moment of zen for the past month.

Riding the 33 matatu from downtown Nairobi out to the Mukuru slum, a 15km trip, costs about 40 shillings ($0.50). Last Friday, I squeezed into one such 33.  With the customary two coin taps on the glass window from the conductor, the driver pulled out with routinely reckless abandon into the traffic of Nairobi. A few minutes in, the conductor gave his customary finger tap, which is the signal to pay. I handed him the usual fare and went back to reading my book. He gave me the money back and grunted that it cost 70 shillings. 

 

Now, obviously, the difference of a quarter is not going to break my back, but I always get principled on the bus. The instant certainty that I am getting scammed because I am a foreigner is aggravating in an all-consuming kind of way. It's the perfect storm of the frustrations of living in the developing world: a crappy vehicle, aggressive hawkers, hot and polluted air, me becoming a shiny object of attention, and nobody to talk to despite being surrounded by so many people.

 

 “Look. It’s never 70 bob,” I said.  He glared, determined to intimidate. The Kenyan woman in front of me laughed and then dropped her eyes to the ground.  I went back to my book, and he tapped me again. I’m not falling for your tricks, I thought. He started cursing under his breath and then just glared more. He eventually took my original fare with a heap of disdain.

 

I got off the bus, as did the woman in front of me. I asked her how much she had paid, and she said, “70 shillings” and started howling with laughter. “Those guys – they want the world. You were good to stand up to him.” I suppose I was, especially because I have paid the foreigner’s tax plenty of times before, but some part of me also felt foolish for assuming that the conductor had cheated me.

 

Nothing’s constant and therefore nothing’s certain in Nairobi.

 

***

 

Indeed, I’ve come to expect that there is no real process to anything in Nairobi. From government procedures to traffic laws to “scheduled” power outages, there is fickleness everywhere. The country cannot even decide which day to schedule a general election.

 

And so it was that I took a yoga class this week. The Africa Yoga Project was set up to train people from the slums to give yoga sessions to citizens in the slums. To make it viable, the instructors give private lessons, which the Sanergy team took to unkink ourselves from those cramped matatus. Part of me, I have to admit, was driven by a game we used to play in China called, “What’s the most hipster-like activity a foreigner can do?” Listening to NPR podcasts on your iPod while taking the Transiberian Railway was one favorite answer. I think that yoga in the slums of Nairobi gave it a good run for its money though.

 

The most amazing thing about it all was how strikingly normal it was. Catherine, our instructor from the Eastleigh slum who had been trained as an acrobat, showed up on time equipped with yoga mats and an assistant. She directed us through a series of stretches and poses with clarity and with discipline. We did Warrior Ones, Twos and Threes. She used reassuring Sanskrit phrases that I only know to mean wherever I am in the world as “You are doing yoga.” We had a strong flow going on to the point that I even knew what the next steps would be. When my body cheated into a pose, the assistant dutifully came over and righted the offending wrong. Why can’t everything be like this in Nairobi?

 

But OK, it wasn’t all straight forward. There was one moment where Catherine led us into the triangle pose - standing, legs spread out straight, you bend your head to touch your knee – and Catherine implored us, “Kiss your knee! Come on, give it a big, French kiss. Not a cheap little peck. Kiss it!”

 

Safe to say, it’s hard to kiss your knee when you’re laughing – which no matter what situation I am in here is what I need most to be able to do.

My sister Becky - the Bauerbach - is working in the West Bank for the next month...here's her account of her first week there!

***

I am writing from a decadent hotel room in Jerusalem with a balcony overlooking the pool and a mosque just over the wall. You can see the minaret from my window and the muezzin has been calling Muslims to prayer for the last ten minutes. Very holy sounds.

Work started on Wednesday and was slow at first. They put me to filing since the head of the project who I am assisting was on vacation this week. It was fun to meet the staff and put faces to email addresses. That night I went to watch the World Cup Spain-Germany game at a lovely outdoor restaurant/bar where they have flat screen TVs  on stone walls and comfy white couches and hookah galor - they call it Argilah. Everyone smokes their own hookah which seems like a lot to smoke. Apparently smoking a hookah for one hour is the same as a pack of cigarettes. Anyway, everyone was very excited about the game, which was fun, and I got to talk to some of the people that work on their project about how they like living in Ramallah, what they think of the project etc. One of our staff lives in a quiet neighborhood where people run and walk and she started a running club (of 4-6 people) that I want to try and join in on after work some days to get out to see the landscape a bit.  Day two at work I felt more productive and met with some of the team and help lay out a plan to have several short term technical experts come to help the project in the next couple months - nutritional statisticians, emergency doctors, among others.

I then took off to Jerusalem on Thursday since Friday was a holiday. I wanted to go to Tel Aviv on the bus but was held up by the march for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. According to our security guy who relayed the story to me as he drove me to the bus station, Galit was captured by Hamas almost four years ago and Hamas was asking for 1000 Palestinians to be freed in exchange for returning Shalit. Netanyahu offered 450 prisoners and the exchange did not go through. So this Israeli soldier's family is protesting the Israeli government and has been marching peacefully for about a week along with 10,000-15,000 supporters and is now camped out outside the prime ministers place. It is a big deal here in Israel and closed the road to Tel Aviv. So, I spent the early evening at a co-workers house in the Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem – a beautifully light and airy apartment midst side roads of rubble. We ate Shwarma take out for dinner before our security man picked me up and drove me to the bus station.

The march is all the more interesting to me because the IDF is mandatory for Israelis after high school. Shalit is younger than I am by about 6 months. They graduate highschool, then serve 2-3 years in the army, then all seem to want to beckpack in South America, then maybe college is next. Israelis that I have met here that are my age have all served in the army. On the buses they travel home every Friday for Shabbat carrying their backpacks and massive guns. You get used to it and I feel safe, but it is strange to be sitting at a train and have someone’s gun leaning on your leg.

I reached Tel Aviv and found my way to my friend  apartment. She had done birth right at the beginning of the summer and then stayed on for the summer. She knows several  IDF soldiers because they place 8 of them on the birth right trips. Also most Israelis her age are currently in the IDF. The soldiers on the birth right trips are told not to say anything bad about Israel and IDF. (interesting). They become close friends, however, so I think the American Jews get a little more balanced perspective than one might think. Some other friends that were visiting this weekend had an IDF soldier on their trip that had been on the flotilla. It has still been hard to get the real story of what happened there - so many perspectives. I have yet to bring this sort of thing up with my Palestinian staff...I may try to test the waters first. Most are hyper-sensitive, understandably, but I imagine they are eager to share their perspective.

 On Friday we took a day trip to Haifa to see the Bah'ai gardens. They span up the side of a mountain which was very impressive. You could not walk through them though, unless you were Bahai or got a tour. We just looked at them from above. Also interesting is that the security people there were Bahai and were not allowed to tell us what Bahai people believe (under Israeli law they cannot teach Bahai). We wanted to see Elijah's cave at the base of Mount Carmel, but it was closed for Shabbat. We hiked a little ways up the mountain and found a beautiful view of the city and the coast and aquamarine water. You could also see Lebanon which reminded me how small Israel is, the size of New Jersey, I have been told. We also found a windmill that was turned into a chapel in the 60s.

 Everything shuts down on Friday afternoon until Saturday sunset for Shabbat, including transport. This proves inconvenient for the tourist, but we managed to catch a Sherut which is an Arab-run taxi-van share service that does not observe Shabbat and made our way back to Tel Aviv that way. We then made fajitas for Shabbat and blessed the sangria, the tortillas and the guacamole. Saturday we spent at Banana Beach along with the rest of Tel Aviv. Paddle ball is a big deal here.  The constant click-clock sound of players trying to achieve the longest rally blends rhythmically into the sound of crashing waves and Hebrew chit chat. July is also jelly fish season but the water is clear and warm and very salty. We then had a military time mix up and thought a reggae/stomp/blueman group dance show we had tickets would start at 8pm, not 1800 (6pm) and missed the show but had a charming walk around Jaffa - an older part of the city on the coast and ate Paella on the shore watching the sunset.

I don’t know anything about Monterrey, Mexico – my new home for the next 10 weeks. Since I’m working in venture capital this summer, most people have assumed that I am in Monterey, California, near to Silicon Valley. But, nope, I am in northern Mexico, two hours from the US border, in the second largest city that did not even make Fodor’s 2010 Mexico travel guide.

It’s a beautiful city surrounded by mountains that I can’t help but daydream at from my office. They tower over the city imposing structure and commanding respect. So often, I arrive in a new city and have neither physical nor mental bearings. But mountains, they provide assurance. This city and culture demand much adaptation of me, but the mountains are a constant and easy to understand. I like that on week one.  The drawback, though, is that the mountains create a pressure-cooker effect where the 90-degree heat hardly relents in the evening. There’s a veil of pollution floating above us that traps even more heat. And thus, it’s safe to say it’s really hot here.  

I try to not focus on the weather too much. Rather, the food is what keeps me busy. The dishes of choice are twofold: sushi and tacos. I’ve had sushi twice already and each time a local explains, “This isn’t Japanese sushi. This is Mexican sushi.”  As if that clarifies anything. Philadelphia cream cheese (simply called filadelfia on menus), a tangy chipotle sauce, and then deep-fried “empanazido” style, you can barely taste the fresh seafood that has been flown into our landlocked city. Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely delicious. But it’s sort of like putting blue cheese on a hamburger and then the whole meal tastes like blue cheese.

I know, it’s shocking, but tacos are everywhere.  A particular favorite time to eat them is in the morning - “Tacos Mananeros.” My friend Ignacio explained, “We love tacos in Monterrey. We know that they are unhealthy. And so, to make sure that we don’t eat them every morning, a lot of workplaces have Taco Friday.” He proceeded to explain that he actually joined a secret society at his former work just to have access to the best tacos. He told me this on Friday afternoon – I wish I had been forewarned a little earlier. For having arrived at work on Friday morning, one of my co-workers excitedly approached me. “It’s Taco Friday!” Uncaffeinated, I was totally confused and responded with a flat “Que?” She was disappointed that it needed explaining, but once we got through that, she asked “How many do you want?” and I disappointed her even more. I wanted to be a team player, but I also had just eaten breakfast and, still, the idea of tacos at 9am doesn’t exactly get me salivating. I volunteered to eat one, but was quickly reprimanded. “Just one? We normally eat 5.” Ugh, peer pressure transcends all cultures. I ordered two and won some temporary respect. I know better now because it was a joyous 45 minutes for the whole staff.

World Cup Fever is rising. The main cell-phone provider sends free text messages to all of its subscribers with up-to-the-minute updates from South Africa. To opt out, you have to send a text message that basically declares “Uncle.” At the office, they’ve instituted a policy called Viernes Verdes, which means Green Friday, and everyone is encouraged to wear green in support of Mexico. The first match is South Africa versus Mexico tomorrow at 9am. If Mexico wins, one co-worker explained, we pretty much have the day off. Then he corrected himself, in fact, the entire country will have the day off.

Tacos, sushi and football – very much a Latin summer with a raw twist of the unexpected. Exciting times ahead…

My friend John, who works at google.org, recently made a trip to Liberia. His bosses asked him to write a blog post about his experiences there. John wrote a really solid account of the challenges facing the country as it grows. You can read it here: http://blog.google.ohttp://posterous.com/posts/edit/18378488rg/2010/04/liberia-country-in-transition.html. On one hand, Liberia is a young democracy which encourages dialogue and new ideas.  On the other, it still faces challenges around corruption. There is very little intellectual property protection or copyright laws in place.

 

Fast forward one week and John receives an email from his friend Dan in Liberia. John’s post on the Google blog has been re-printed without permission as an Op-Ed piece in the New Democrat, one of Liberia’s biggest newspapers. There’s no reference to the Google blog!

 

My sister also noticed that in the post, John cites a graphic, which didn’t even make the reprint!

 

All very meta – I don’t think John could have illustrated his point any better than by having the New Democrat steal his content.

 

Skydiving in Vegas

I am always worrying about something. I know how frivolous an exercise it is, but I can’t help it. I sweat the small stuff even though I know it’s all small stuff. Family legend says that in kindergarten, instead of taking attendance, the teacher would just ask me who was missing because I needed to know where everyone was at all times and therefore could tell her who was missing.

Skydiving launched me into a whole different stratosphere of worrying. I am not in the habit of putting my life on the line. As a result, the anxiety in the lead-up became a quite existential evaluation of me to date. What have I done with my life? Am I happy? Who will come to my funeral?

The evaluation went well. I like my life – my family, my friends, my choices, and even my future. Late one night, I went through my photo albums online to pay a subconscious homage to the happy experiences that I carry with me. The evidence was clear: things have definitely panned out well. But then I reflected a little more and thought about what I needed in my life to make it fuller. I wondered why I struggle to let go or why I never feel at complete ease. Maybe skydiving would solve all that.

Not jumping crossed my mind several times. I called my dad who was in hospital thanks to a freak bike accident to let him know my plan and he said with more than a tinge of disappointment, “You kids, always living life on the edge.” Walking through the streets of New York, my friend asked, “Do you really think you’ll be different after the jump?” A fair question. Another friend, who I think of as a risk-taker, fired back the line from the action movie Point Break, “Why would I jump out of a perfectly useful plane?” Another fair question. Finally, on the flight to Las Vegas, I looked out the window and couldn’t stomach how I would willingly jump out of a plane. The childhood thought that the clouds might catch me offered little reassurance.

But the counter-forces in the life-or-death universe were in play too. I’ll get reason number one out of the way quickly: I want to know what it’s like to fly. Peter Pan, the Wright Brothers, those guys who fly off cliffs, I’m envious of them all. Closely related to that, I want to be somebody who has the guts to jump out of a plane. I remember how I felt when I decided not to Bungee Jump a few years back. I went through the same existential evaluation and decided then, too, that I had had a good life and, at that time, decided that I wouldn’t want that to be damaged by an untimely snapped cord. The decision not to jump still weighs more heavily on my mind than any greater epiphany I had about my life. And, finally, there is my best friend Adam, the soon-to-be settled, married guy and the guy who pushes me further than anyone. Skydiving couldn’t be a better final chapter for us both as bachelors and this would be the ultimate push.

What actually happened hardly required the psychological analysis that I obsessed over. Four of us – Adam, Ezra, Derald and me – hopped into a van on the Las Vegas Strip. We watched a video in which the pioneer of skydiving, a guy who looks a lot like a Druid priest, reminded us that we were putting our lives at risk. An awesome, bodacious risk, but a risk nonetheless. We initialed a lot of documents saying that we understood the risk. We learned the basics of how to do a tandem jump: the arched banana, the wing spread, and a practiced landing which entailed just lifting up my feet. That’s it? We got suited up. We met our instructors – each of whom had over 5000 jumps and had done 4 that day.

At this very moment, I realized I would survive. It must be strange for the instructors to jump mundanely every day while most of their customers are going through their biggest optional reckoning on Earth.

The plane lifts off. I won’t land with this plane, which is another strange first. The pilot reminds me of the crop-duster in Independence Day, so perhaps it’s just as well. The instructors keep us relaxed with alpha-male jokes about ball-and-chain marriages, failed jumps, and their high blood alcohol content level. My instructor’s tone soon turned very professional, “David, we are going to have a great jump. Trust me and enjoy this.” I appreciated this more than knee-slapping jokes.

At 15,000 feet, it’s time to jump. Ezra goes first. In the blink of an eye, he’s gone.  I know that he’s fallen, but I haplessly don’t know where he’s gone to. The emptiness of the plane without Ez is stark and there’s a moment where I think he could be gone forever. But that quickly changes into another feeling of even greater readiness. Maybe I’ll need to help Ez on the way down – I better get going! We scoot up to the exit and then I jump too.

The freefall is exhilarating. It’s fast – over 120 mph – for about a minute. It’s not as intense as I expect. Those childhood fantasies pour forth again and I imagine that there will be some out-of-body experience, like when a spaceship goes into light speed. Because everything is so distant – the mountains, the ground, the sky – I have no perspective on the speed. It’s just liberating. I look around and see the Hoover Dam, downtown Las Vegas, and red rocks everywhere. I enjoy the view, but the view doesn’t matter. It’s the freedom and the sense of accomplishment that I'm loving. I want my whole body to experience this and so I scream, letting the wind go through my veins.

The parachute opens. I feel a complete sense of ease with the world and with myself as we soar in circles all the way down. These are the feelings I crave most in the world and ones that I so seldom feel. And for a moment, I have them. That alone made it all worthwhile.

More stories from Cambodia with a little more of an academic bent:

http://beyondprofit.com/?p=1314

DSWA

Hi Family and Friends,

Here's my latest from traveling the world! Uh, I mean being a student.

As always, I would love to hear back from you. And I hope our paths cross sooner rather than later.You can see my other travel writings at endeavoringdave.posterous.com if you're interested.

Yours,

David

***

A grizzled professor told me the other day, “All you kids do is find ways to travel and then squeeze in business school between trips.” Since I’ve now spent all of January in Kenya and Silicon Valley and the last two weeks in Indonesia and Cambodia, he may have a point.

But this latest trip has been particularly cool. This semester, in a class, I’ve been studying how market-based solutions can help to alleviate poverty in the developing world.  Which is really just a grandiose way of saying "how do we make capitalism work for the poor."

Visiting a country with this idea in mind changes the landscape completely. Four years ago, I visited Cambodia for the first time. I entered through the Thai border, and as I passed through immigration, an official told me that I didn’t have any visa pages available left in my passport.  There were blank pages, but they were not for visa entries even though other countries had willingly inserted visas there. After twenty minutes of who-can-act-more-dumbfounded arguing in two broken languages, the official invented a tax that I could pay today to get through. Soon, I was on the dusty road to Angkor Wat, albeit carrying that unshakably frustrating feeling of having been extorted. It still irks me [my teeth clench as I write].

That dusty road sticks in my mind. It was an endless stream of stands selling the same products – gasoline in Pepsi bottles for motorbikes, a variety of soft drinks, household goods, and fruits. Nothing more, nothing less. People were lazing about in the shade. I felt depressed – I didn’t understand where opportunity was coming from.

This time, we flew directly into Phnom Penh, the capital and economic engine. Instead of immediately visiting the Killing Fields – where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge enacted genocide - we headed to a variety of social enterprises. You can read about all of them at our group blog – finnovation.tumblr.com – but one that I really liked was called Digital Divide Data, which provides technology jobs for Cambodians. Western companies outsource digitization and data entry jobs (for example, they were transforming the 1940 Daily Princetonian into a digital archive when we were there) to DDD whose staff of young Cambodians spend 6 hours a day inputting data. That’s the business side. On the education side, the staff is learning both English and IT skills, and also spends another 6 hours a day studying at a local college as part of a work-study arrangement. After four years, students “graduate” from DDD and work for other Cambodian companies. DDD has already graduated over a thousand people who are earning 6x the average wage...this is a model for development that makes sense to me.

The MIT Sports Analytics Conference blew me away today.  

There were the personal reasons: as a keen despiser of the Patriots, I savored every moment of Bill Polian, GM of the Colts, listing off ten reasons why the Colts knew that the Pats were going to go for it on 4^th and 2 earlier this season, all while Jonathan Kraft, owner of the Patriots, and the Sports Guy Bill Simmons just sat on the panel re-living the nightmare. And then, the coup de grace, from Polian, “I would have done the same thing too.”

Secondly, though, it was an esoteric affirmation of why I am at business school. In every panel, the GMs and Personnel Directors who are leading the best teams (from a management perspective), were invoking the ideas that we study in class: options, arbitrage opportunities, decision trees, undervaluing of assets. My favorite story was one Assistant GM who said, “When an agent strikes a deal with us whereby the client gets an extra year if he hits certain milestones (at-bats, hits etc), he thinks that he has a gift. I think that he’s wrong – we’ve got an arbitrage opportunity!” These guys were really using the tools that they learned to change the fates of their organizations. The contrast provided was from British football teams in attendance (Chelsea and Manchester City), who suffer from the whims of owners driven by emotion and gut feelings rather than analytical evidence.

In my own career, I strive to apply a business mindset to a topic that many think is hardly business at all: the support from the West to the developing world. Why aren’t we able to constructively apply ideas that have worked in the business world here to issues around development? What will it take to make this a mainstream movement?

It was refreshing to witness today that aspects of sports that have traditionally not endured much business scrutiny – talent assessment, finding undervalued players – are now at the center of the conversation. And, with discipline, rigor and careful analysis, people are able to transform their industries by putting the abstract principles from b-school into practice.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/05/redpoint-invests-4-4-million-in-fast-growing-posterous/

How meta!