sona khosla

One of my close friends just had her second son. She named him Will. This got me thinking about names.

What’s in a name?
Does the name make us who we are or do we make the name? The likely answer is that it’s a little of both. But, one thing I know for sure is that names have strong emotional associations. Back to the name Will: It’s a name that means a lot to me. While I had a good and quirky artist friend in high school named Will, in more recent years I had a watershed moment with a colleague named Will.

The story of Will
It was late in the work day and I made an executive decision that wasn’t necessarily mine to make. Honestly, it was a combination of having to act quickly under pressure, not thinking thoroughly through the situation and feeling too tired to walk over to consult with the people who needed to be consulted.

This decision caused an almost instantaneous rush of two senior-level directors and an irate executive towards my desk. They put me in my proverbial place. I was caught off guard. I got defensive. I justified my decision. I raised my voice. I got mad. I backed down. I reluctantly apologized. An innocent by-standing colleague watched wide-eyed.

I went home a complete stress case, tense in the shoulders, a raging fire within and re-playing the drama over and over again justifying my actions to myself. I slept like shit. And then I woke up in the morning and went to work again hoping not to run into any of these guys.

The real Will
I walked into work and was met with a voicemail, an email and a note from a co-worker that Will, one of the three storming guys, wanted to speak with me. I was terrified. I figured I was gonna get it again.

And then something totally unexpected happened. Will spoke. He had a sleepless night. He spent the night talking to his wife about what went down. He apologized for “bullying and crucifying” me. He made no excuses. He took full responsibility. He apologized with heart and sincerity. He asked for my forgiveness. He promised to not treat anyone disrespectfully again. Then as if that wasn’t stunning enough, he said he cared more about being who he truly is than having a job and doing what the boss wants.

The courage of Will
Will’s courageous words triggered a deep and important realization that I, too, had strayed far from my values. I, too, had become someone I wasn’t proud of. I, too, got swept up in organizational bullshit and sacrificed what’s important to me. I, too, lost myself without ever realizing it.

The gift of Will
They say that maximum growth occurs at the border of order and chaos. Amidst all of the stress, fear and adrenaline, Will helped me re-connect with the person I really am and want to be. Will’s conscious decision to take responsibility for his actions and his choice to be true to who he is despite any organizational and personal consequence triggered the same desire in me. Will gave me the will to take the risk of being myself.

I believe Will lived up to his name and by doing so reinforced its powerful meaning. My friend’s newest baby is blessed to share such a powerful name with an individual who has stand-out integrity, so this blog is written in Will’s honour — both of them.

Definition of “will” excerpted from www.dictionary.com.

Prague, Czech Republic, May 2010. Some photos courtesy Jennifer Ming.

A few weekends ago, my husband asked me on a date. After months of renovating, I was keen to spend some quality time together. But since there was still much to do on the house, he decided it would be fun if I helped him do a dump run. Okay, that’s kind of bizarrely romantic.

A dump virgin
In all my years in Calgary, I’ve never been to the dump. I was in awe the entire time. My husband had to keep reminding me to close my mouth. I was like a kid in the car with her cheek pressed up against the window trying to see this strange new place from every angle.

The thing that struck me the most was the birds. Everyone says this. The sound of birds cawing and wings flapping in an almost cloudless, bright sky makes for a heightened sensory experience. And then there’s this strange juxtaposition between the lovely earthy hills and these perfect rows of garbage waiting to be hidden under them. The dump is beautiful and hideous.

The politics of garbage
I’m not always brave enough to break rules, but this one I didn’t know I was breaking. I asked my husband to take a picture of me at the dump. I wanted to remember this. After a few model shots, one of the landfill supervisors came over and let us know that it was against the rules to take pictures at the dump. My husband, being the freedom fighter that he is, did not take well to:

a) being told what to do;
b) being asked not to take pictures on public property;
c) the city trying to hide what goes in the “landfill.” 

It became clear that there’s a line between personally disposing of your garbage and the politics of commercial dump trucks coming in and not separating the recyclables from the real garbage. Just how much doesn’t need to be thrown away, but is? You don’t want to know, trust me.

Connecting with my garbage
I think it’s normal not to think much about your garbage. Instead, we spend a lot more time thinking about our recycling. But on this day, I became so much more aware of the things I throw away and where they go. I could see the bloat I was creating in the earth’s belly and I felt bad. I had this overwhelming sense of the Earth as a beautiful woman who is unwillingly being fed our crap. I felt like I was betraying a mother, someone who has literally given me life.

Strangely enough, I’ve had a lasting connection to my garbage since this fateful date. I can no longer just throw unwanted stuff away without feeling for a moment where it’s really going. It’s no longer “out of sight, out of mind.” Remember about a month ago, I broke my SLR. Well, instead of throwing it out and replacing it, I got it fixed. And instead of throwing out my gimpy suitcase with a broken foot, I got it fixed. And instead of replacing my laptop that doesn’t have a battery anymore and requires a 24/7 connection to the wall, I’m inclined to use it until it drives me to the edge of madness.

A date to remember
I’m transformed. For this, I guess I owe thanks to my husband’s unorthodox idea of love. 

I loooove this book. Yes, loooove with 4 o’s.

The Designful Company: How to Build a Culture of Nonstop Innovation is the third of Marty’s “whiteboard books” in which he takes a deep and complex topic on branding and simplifies it so that it just makes plain sense.

The powerful concept that Marty (I feel like we’re on a first name basis) presents here is that design is change. Wowzer. That’s so powerful. Mainly because it takes the power out of the hands of the few people who know how to use Photoshop and puts it in the hands of every individual in an organization. There are so many kinds of designers. People who re-engineer process. People who design ads. People who dream up new solutions for customers. People who champion the people in their company. People in Marketing. People in Product. People in Customer Service. People in HR. People everywhere.

What I love about this book is that it reminded me of a part of myself I sometimes lose. The creative, the designer, the one who cares so much about beauty, harmony and integrity. The one who fusses over typography and prides herself on guessing the typeface being used in the movie credits. It’s so easy to lose this part of myself. I get caught in typical left-brain ideals like the bottom line, rules, margins, KPIs, standards and start to lose touch with that part of myself that knows with something other than my logic. Then, even worse, I lose respect for my intuition, my instincts, my desire to make things better and different and I become part of the “system” that I myself don’t respect.

Anyways, this book reminded me that designers and creatives are to be respected, if not understood. And it reminded me to trade in the “or” for the “and” to find creative solutions to “wicked problems” that all organizations face like: balancing long-term goals with short-term demands; predicting the returns on innovative concepts; combining profitability and social responsibility. It’s true, these can be solved, albeit not easily.

Admist the simple aesthetic of the book lies some revolutionary ideas that have the power to transform people and corporations. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t just another little book on branding.

I broke our SLR camera during our trip to Nelson, so I’m constantly asking my husband if I can borrow his iPhone to capture stuff I see around me.

Here’s a shot taken at Stanley Park earlier today. We were throwing the ball for our dog and I looked up in the sky and caught site of this:

Courtesy of Bruce’s iPhone

A few weeks ago, my husband and I went on a short roadtrip. During our getaway we stopped in on my husband’s ex-wife’s parents whom he has remained close with since his divorce over 12 years ago. The 24 hours we spent together changed me.

They shared stories of travelling 1,000 miles across the Congo and doing an emergency tracheotomy to save a baby’s life. 

They shared the tragedy of losing a friend who escaped a train fire, only to die when she went back to gather some important papers. She was a gentle nun who they worked with in a burn unit at a charity hospital in Jalandhar, India.

They shared the joy of their son and his partner’s recent adoption of two older boys and their first trip on a plane to visit their new extended family.

My husband’s ex-father-in-law shared the “good fortune” he has had watching hundreds of people die and noticing it’s the ones who have loved—not the ones who believed in God—that have gone with the most grace.

He shared the experience of watching his father die 26 days short of turning 100 years old.

He told us tales of riding his daughter’s old mountain bike from Kelowna to Guatamala, riding a road bike solo from the Arctic Circle in Norway to the Southern edge of Malta, kayaking down the Danube and surviving unpredictable winds and waves in a kayak off the shore of Vancouver Island where at least one man has gone missing before. All of this done after his 60th birthday.

He looked us in the eye and told us he could die happy today.

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I realized that this couple lives a life of meaning. I connected with an emptiness at the bottom of my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like I was contributing to something meaningful.

Something woke up inside of me. A longing. A stirring. A deep-rooted desire. A memory and maybe a commitment I made somewhere, sometime to make my life count.

“Children were not a way of ensuring happiness or endowing my days with meaning…That hard task was mine alone.” –Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier isn’t just a brilliant Canadian poet, she’s also right. I first read this bold statement in an article called “The Case Against Having Kids” originally published in MacLean’s Magazine.

I can only imagine that having children is one of the most intensely transformative and meaningful events in one’s life. But I don’t think it’s the children per se that make it so. It’s the willingness to experience something fully—good and bad—that creates the opening for meaning. It’s in the beholder.

Ultimately, it is us alone who are responsible for our happiness; and oddly enough, this idea is comforting because it makes happiness all the more possible.

I always thought the iRobot Roomba vacuums were a stupid invention—until I got a dog and had to vacuum almost every day.

On a recent shopping spree at London Drugs (one of my all-time favourite stores), I found one on sale. After my husband and I got over the initial shock that we were actually considering buying a robot to help us with housework, we picked it up and brought it home. My husband immediately charged the little sucker then put it into action in the living room. I watched him follow it around the house, commenting on its effectiveness with surprise and delight. He even broke out the flashlight, got down on the living room floor and investigated the Roomba’s wake under the sofa. Not many products can bring a grown man to his knees.

The money spent on our Roomba is the best money we’ve spent in the last 6 months. After 1 week with it, I stopped a meeting at work just to share the Roomba’s time-saving benefits and urge my colleagues to buy one too. I even lent it out to my sister so she could get a taste of freedom from vacuuming (she’s buying one for herself for Mother’s Day). I love this little cleaning machine because it’s freed me from back pain, a chore I’ve always hated and dust bunnies so big they could form governments in the corners of my house.

No offence to my beloved dog, but the Roomba is definitely my new best friend.

About 8 months ago, my husband and I made the switch to raw food for our pup. Prior to feeding her raw, we had her on Acana, a reputable dry kibble made with fresh local ingredients. The problem was that she continued to experience diarrhea and an upset stomach even on high-quality kibble. After 3 days on raw food, however, the pooch’s stomach was a-okay.

Pets Go Raw - love it!
There’s a lot of raw options out there; some of them expensive, others labourious. We chose to go with Pets Go Raw. The mix of raw meat with bone, fresh fruit and veggies, as well as vitamins and herbs like garlic and vitamin C made for a great full meal. Pets Go Raw food also came in a variety of meats like chicken, turkey, beef and fish. This let us mix it up every now and then. At about $10-$15 for about 10 ounces of raw food, it was a good price. The product was easy to prep and thaw too. It came in hockey puck patties that fit nicely in tupperware so we could prep a few days’ worth of food in about 5 minutes while keeping a few extra patties in the freezer.

The thing about raw food is that it can be a mess to prep and feed to your pup, so it’s important that you don’t have to touch the food at all. The Pets Go Raw packaging was perfect for this. There were little slips of paper between the meat patties which meant that you could slide the frozen patties out of the bag and into a tupperware container without touching it. And then when it came time for feeding the dog, you could just turn the tupperware upside down, drop the food in the bowl, then throw the empty container in the sink for a quick rinse and still not get any meat juice on your hands. Perfect!

We told friends about the product. Good price, great quality, easy to prep and feed. You’re happy, your dog is happy, it’s all good.

Pets Go Raw introduces new packaging
After 8 months of feeding our dog Pets Go Raw raw food and advocating the brand to friends for their furry family members, Pets Go Raw changed their packaging. The dog health food stores were pumping us up about the new package saying it comes in easy-to-squeeze tubes, full 1-ounce packages and new branding.

Here’s a picture that shows what the packaging looked like before (the packages on the bottom 2 shelves) and after (the top 2 shelves).

Pets Go Raw (new packaging) - hate it!
After 1 week of working with the new packaging, my husband noticed I was always asking him to do feed the dog. I no longer had the interest or desire to prep or feed our pooch. What I discovered was that I hated the new packaging so much that it actually ruined the bonding experience of feeding my dog.

The new packaging is sealed with two metal clamps at either end of a plastic tube. It looks a lot like a hot dog with metal clasps at the top and bottom. Here are just some of the problems with the new packaging:

• You can’t open it when it’s frozen. So you have to wait for the meat to thaw in the hot-dog tube and then slice the top open with a knife. This means that your hands get wet with raw meat juice when you are opening the package. Gross.
• It doesn’t re-seal well. We don’t feed our dog a full ounce at a time, so we would end up with these half-open tubes in our fridge. Even worse, the meat juice leaked down 2 shelves in our fridge into our vegetable crisper. So my husband ended up spending a Saturday afternoon scrubbing all the crevices of our fridge to get the meat juice out. Brutal.
• There’s more food wastage. You can’t get all of the food out of the tube because it sticks to the sides and openings. Raw food ain’t cheap, so getting every last bit into your dog’s bowl is important. With each portion we were throwing perfectly good morsels away. Bad.
• They aren’t stackable. With raw dog food, you always have to stock some in your fridge and your freezer. If they aren’t stackable, they take up too much room in both places. Annoying.

A “good” business decision with a bad customer experience result
You can see how the new packaging is cheaper for Pets Go Raw - lots of the other brands do it too. It must give them higher margins, which makes business sense. The problem is that the new packaging completely ruins the experience of feeding your dog. People who love dogs know how important feeding is to the bonding process. Pets Go Raw should have kitchen-tested their new packaging before rolling it out. They would have realized that it took all the love and pride out of feeding your dog the best food money can buy.

I spoke with my friend who was also a Pets Go Raw fan. She hates the new packaging too. I mentioned my disappointment in the new packaging at the dog health food store too; they said they’ve been hearing a lot of the same.

Switched to Urban Carnivore
Last time I went to re-stock my raw food supply, I switched to Urban Carnivore (I think they are changing their brand name to Carnivora). It’s a little more expensive, but the packaging is just like the old Pets Go Raw hockey-puck packaging. I am planning to contact Pets Go Raw about their new packaging, but in the meantime, I’m happily feeding my dog again and telling my friends to make the switch too.

Yes, another children’s book. That’s what happens when you’re 32 and your only regular activity is attending baby showers.

Admittedly, Hug has become my de facto baby shower gift for 3 reasons:

1. It made me cry the first time I read it in the childrens’ section of a NE location of Chapters.
2. My friend called me up and told me her 2-year-old daughter loves having it read by her mama.
3. The protagonist’s name is Bobo - a nickname my mom had for me when I was little.

See the book cover below? How could you resist? Seriously?