A funny thing happened on the way here...

Message delivered at Teaching Technology in the Modern Age: University of West Florida Cybersecurity Forum, August 2019

I grew up in rural America. My father was a steel mill worker and my mother a hair dresser. Living in a 70 foot “mobile home” on our 2 acres in the woods, I was the epitome of the average American boy.

I was never really bookish, but, I was always curious. Days spent taking apart bicycles and radios and putting them back together again… with always a few extra parts left over, showed the early vestiges of a mind longing to understand how the world worked, how to engage it, how to find excitement in it.

My teachers however, saw things differently. Some gave me special projects to keep my overactive mind busy, and some pushed me along to “just sit still” or “wait for others”. But then, there was Mr. Benkowski.

Mr. Ben was my 4th grade teacher. He had gotten a special science kit that year with all sorts of lessons and experiments in it.  There were acids and minerals and an amazing thing called a microscope. I was enraptured.

Mr. Ben noticed my curiosity, and, though it was well known that I was far too convinced of my adolescent abilities… Mr. Ben made me his “science helper”. I discovered that I could learn at my own quickened pace, and still be part of the class.

That same year, my mother had saved up her tips for a special birthday present for me.  She had read in a magazine about a computer unlike any she had heard about in the 60s. No rooms of switches, no million dollar price tags. This one you could buy for around $100 bucks at your local Radio Shack store.

And unbeknownst to a 9 year old bundle of energy, who’s life experience spoke more about mud and metal, corn and cows, than anything about life beyond the steel mill, the future unfolded that birthday when a curious white plastic typewriter hooked to the TV set was unwrapped after the candles were blown out.

For you see, the future is a curious thing. You can never really understand it until you get there.

That computer, a TRS-80, in 1979, came at the infancy of an era that was just beginning. No one really knew it. 

Some smart people with hopeful imaginations had made some ambiguously lofty predictions, but, like most late night psychics, what they said could mean almost anything.

Yet there I was, curious, and I had just enough people around me who let me be so.

I never wanted to be a computer engineer. Never.

There was no such thing as what I am now when I was growing up.

The most technology I had ever imagined back then was the Six-Million Dollar Man… and Steve Austen was a hero. I still have that haircut today, 40 years later!

But a funny thing happened on the way here...

• I had parents that let me be curious.
• I had teachers, worried as they often were, who let me explore beyond the test and the lesson plan.
• I had books, and I had questions.
• Oh… those never ending questions….

When I was 12, after a well-intended, but disastrous national policy in the late 70s, and the fallacy of lifelong employment ,had crippled what Dad had hoped to be the American dream, following by two years of unemployment and drowned sorrows… my father risked his meager life savings from the steel mill, and opened a fledgling video rental store. It met a need, and…

Dad’s store took off, giving me the opportunity to attend a school with a computer lab… imagine, 30 Commodore-64s !!!

None of us in 1983, not the teachers, and certainly not the students, thought that we were learning anything that could be a career. Computers were tools for other jobs. We played Oregon Trail, and we programed simple math problems… the arc of a projectile, the volume of a cone… occasionally a small data table to sort information.

After my time in college and seminary… yes, my degree is in Theology, like most seminarians I needed a secular job.

But a funny thing happened… A bank needed someone who could work with their branch staff to fix problems with their ATM machines… a new innovation in the early 90s. However, no one who knew anything about computers back then did anything but work in programming or operations.

“Computers? Sure! I’ve had one since I was 9!”

…and so, they hired me on the spot. I was 22 years old, and had no idea how I got there.

25 years later, here I am.

I helped build the world’s first corporate intranet, simply because I was in the right place at the right time… and was curious.

A little California company heard about me and that job, and because people who were curious enough to keep learning while working were rare then, this little company, Netscape, offered me a job as a Field Engineer.

In 3 years, I was promoted 3 times, because I was constantly learning everything I could about anything I could.

3 years later, I found myself working for the Chief Operating Officer of America Online. A couple of buyouts after that, a not-so-small company named IBM bought the company I worked for. I found myself an executive at the world’s oldest and most renowned technology company, making things that make the future.

Rags to riches? No.

You see there are 3 main ingredients that every person can have for success. Everything else is just flavoring.

These are:

1.  Unbiased Encouragement

Encouragers have our own experiences, our own ambitions, our own vantage point. I had the twin fortunes of having encouragers who let me pursue things interesting to me while keeping me safe, and, I had the luck of boyish impishness to brush off their limits on me in their encouragement.

Whether we are mentoring and teaching 6 year olds or 60 year olds, we must be cautious not to leave too much of our fingerprints, our ambitions, or our ideas about their abilities and interests, upon them. 

We must have enough hope in them that they will discover the things which they are interested in, which satisfy them, which may indeed define them, rather than us doing so.

To be unbiased doesn’t simply mean we are equitable in our encouragement. It means we are unlimited in it, especially when we don’t understand their domain or efforts for ourselves.

2.  Learning how to learn.

At Netscape, along with inventing technologies then that you can’t imagine living without today, from email to online learning, from streaming video to social media, we also invented a phrase which will define this generation, and likely the next 5 generations to come. Every day brought something new to be created or disrupted, so 7 words were heard on our flip-phones every day. 7 words which defined us:

If you can learn, you can earn.

Life long learning, not just in a class room, but purposeful, daily, and diversely, self-driven learning.

In that same vein, every IBMer is now required to invest at least 40 hours of self-learning every year. IBM rigorously tracks every employee’s investment into themselves, and uses this to help them, the company, and our clients, to be the best they possibly can be, and chart their career path to its maximum.

My learning plan for this year is not an outlier. In the 157 hours invested on top of my normal work weeks, I’ve learned about the science of Blockchain, taught myself advanced Quantum computing data models. I learned about new customer relationship management systems, updated my knowledge of Data Center Disaster Recovery, and I expanded my knowledge about the psychology of pan-cultural negotiations.

In an ever changing world, that motto from Netscapers still rings true…

“If you can learn, you can earn.”

The third ingredient is like diamonds: it’s not rare at all, but people believe it is, and so they struggle to obtain them.

That third ingredient to success is:

3. Having a problem to solve.

Whether a mechanic or military staff, professor or pianist, a job is nothing more than being paid to solve someone else’s problem.

We need to learn how to learn, and so we pay people to be teachers.  We need help to become healthy again, so we pay people to be doctors and nurses. We need to keep our car running so we can get on with our lives, and so we pay people to be mechanics.

Every job centers around solving the other person’s problem.

… and yet, our educational model, and as a result, our societal expectations of these 3 key things has fallen short. Even though these 3 things work in Milton, in Manchester, and in Mumbai.

We have constructed out of our recent history something that has derailed us, and our students, from reaching a rich and meaningful life, and replaced it with expectations that fall short for them, and for us as a society.

Today, while over 82% of all children in America graduate from High School, less than 30% of those complete college. 

Less than 60% of all College enrollee’s complete their program, meaning that we have a vast population that have debt, but no degree.

And even beyond that, those that do complete a degree, including advanced degrees, over half work field different than their degree.

So a funny thing happened on the way here…

• Tech companies have noticed.
• Manufacturers have noticed.
• Consultants have noticed.
• Service companies have noticed.
• Even TV shows have noticed.

But only recently, have the very institutions we rely on to train people to learn how to learn… only now, and only a little, have they noticed.

Only 16 out of every 100 High School freshmen are successfully traversing from the college to career pathway… and half of those are in jobs outside of their degree path.

We got here because our educational path follows the Prussian ‘Volsschulen’ model – teaching all children in a monolithic structure, and testing them into pre-determined pathways, ever and always vetting them out of the system into normative groupings. Having followed Mann’s American approach throughout the 2nd wave of the Industrial Revolution, we are rapidly finding it more and more impotent in the Information Age.

Yet, as this model is intertwined in our societal psyche, we must leverage it to meet the demands of not only today, but for that murky future which is beginning to be visible on the horizon.

As we are at the dawn of the next era of human innovation, the third wave of the information revolution, our 3 key ingredients must be central to our every learning ambition.

A disengaged student must be encouraged to explore their curiosity.

A thirst for knowledge must be met robustly with variety.

… and career plans must be structured on an endless search for “the next problem”.

This means we must encourage our students and society to create and accept modern models of continuous learning and experience.

IBM, for one, is investing in “New Collar jobs”, where those with demonstrated skill, experience, or non-degree certificates find ample opportunity matching their much needed abilities.

High Schools and Colleges should offer career vocational programs which include high tech education, outside of degreed Computer Science or similar programs – allowing room for “educated to act” type certifications.

Thirdly – and I take the hit here – Industry must cease from “dumbing down” its certificates in search of temporary bumps in brand loyalty or consulting revenue.  

We have a vast array of people soon to become unemployed because they only know some company’s applications, but actually know little about information and computing.

I’ll close on this somewhat scary, and somewhat hopeful note.

I sit on the board of advisors for arguably one of the best institutions in the country to learn Cybersecurity… skills for which there are right now over a quarter million job openings…. The future is looming.

A new type of computing is coming, which poses tremendous promise: understanding molecular interaction, light speed data processing, unfathomable augmented human intelligence… yet this same promise will disrupt and displace the technologies, received knowledge, and work models that we have crafted over the last 25 years.

Quantum computing and 4th generation AI will be unlike anything we have seen before.

In short, everything we know… is about to change.

…and in such times, it is the learner, the constant learner, who will find opportunity. The life long learner is unafraid of change, for it is the very essence of their being, something new, something … curious.

So, my friends, to give your students the gift of a fulfilled and prosperous life:

Give unbiased encouragement.

Teach them to learn how to learn, and how to seek problems to solve.

So that they too, will be able to stand and say, many decades from now:

… a funny thing happened on the way here.