Dear @pascal_venier

This is in lieu of an email. I had to write to thank you for your tweet last Friday.

While you offered it in jest, I was touched by it at the time…then it began to to haunt and taunt me. While showering that day (where I do my best deep thinking), I kept repeating “Petit Chaperon Rogue”. I was bothered by the familiarity of the phrase. Sure it’s the French to “Little Red Riding Hood” — equal to the original Brothers Grimm “Rotkapchen” (my Twitter handle — which I’ll explain later). But I took German, not French in school.  When I realized why it was familiar, the floodgates flew open.

You offered a key to unlock multiple points of convergence that surely contributed my own successes, similar to the stories introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Thus my own “outlier” story.

My father was in the Air Force. As a second generation son of Pennsylvania coal miners, the Air Force took him to Louisiana, where at a burger drive-in (a critical social entity of that era) he would meet a Cajun French woman, marry her and take her away from the land of her multi-generational heritage — later moving their young family to Columbus, Ohio.

While there is far more to this story, this part takes place while living in a neat, newly built suburban neighborhood with its own elementary school (to which the kids walked each day). It was an era of change. I can still distinctly recall, while walking home one day in 1963 as the older kids informed us of the death of President Kennedy (apparently 2nd-graders were thought to have been too fragile to deal with such news — learning about it as we walked home, I felt cheated).

It was there that I was exposed to one fabulous teacher who helped shaped my destiny. In 1964, my 3rd-grade teacher was the wife of an Air Force Colonel. She was a game changer. She assumed full ownership of her classroom and used all resources to exercise her own potential — from which we all benefitted.

I was lucky. Six of us were selected for accellerated learning. Her husband had built a bank of learning carrels (a large table with pegboard ‘walls’, divided into six private desk spaces). On the wall of each space hung a set of headphones (a far cry from the tiny earbuds of today) connected to a cumbersome reel-to-reel tape player. While the rest of the class received  ‘regular’ lessons in real time, we worked on “reel-time” lessons that our teacher recorded in advance. This was the precursor to computer-based-training.

In that wonderful classroom, we had a class pet (a horned toad, to which we fed mealy worms) and all sorts of magical things to expand our learning by creative means. Of greatest significance to this story were the papier mache’ puppets we made for the plays we performed, in French — including, “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge”. While I was the wolf in that play, and not Red Riding Hood, the many things I learned in that classroom are still vivid in my mind. I am proud to be a living testament to that teacher, who, even then was willing to push the envelope on learning.

Many who follow me on Twitter may not realize the significance of my use of the Rotkapchen moniker. Through many other 1964 moments in my life, I learned to relish pushing the envelope on the norm. As I go, I collect many interesting stories and artifacts of interest. The Red Riding Hood character is the perfect persona to conjure the imagery of wandering corporate forests, adding things of interest to my basket, and dodging wily wolves.

The reason for choosing the German Rotkapchen (pronounced: wrote-KEP-hen) offers a bit of insight into the value of assessing the ‘original’ and understanding its initial intent. The English version of the story we know came from a French translation, which was altered somewhat. While I can’t find it, there was one German version I’d read in which Rotkapchen slaps her forehead with her hand and exclaims “My God!” — as a grand celebration of an ‘aha’ moment (something I relish). As well, she brought her grandmother cake and wine — a far more celebratory collection of items in the basket to cheer up her grandmother.

I’m also far more likely to allow myself to be distracted by the opportunity to collect flowers to surprise someone. I abhor plans that prevent us from taking advantage of the things that cross our paths along the way — often far more valuable than the destination or which can make our destination that much more meaningful.

The Enterprise 2.0 era is ripe for connecting the Rotkapchen’s of the world — allowing them to compare the contents of their baskets and enlighten each other with their own stories and adventures: All the better to thwart self-serving wolves in the forest.