In which Jill espouses the belief that it’s about where you came from.
I came of age in southern California in the 1970s. It was the era of Frampton Comes Alive!, Vans skate shoes (custom, of course), and the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.” Polyurethane skate wheels had just emerged and a radio station called KMET (“The Mighty Met”) blared from our car stereos when we weren’t playing our 8-tracks.
Once my friends and I started driving we’d career down L.A.’s notorious canyons to a beach called Staircase that only the locals knew. We’d surf and tan in lieu of Algebra II—regular sojourns that in retrospect explain my math skills. My friend Cherie’s dad lived in Topanga Canyon with his much-younger girlfriend and they’d smoke high-grade pot on their porch while my friends and I drank our Tabs and tried furtively to appear jaded. On weekend evenings the sound of acoustic guitar and vocal harmonies would waft up from the canyon below. Cherie’s dad told us it was Crosby, Stills, and Nash jamming with Joni Mitchell in Neil Young’s streamside bungalow.
Maybe for you it’s your mom’s meatloaf. Or perhaps it’s the smell of the pine trees that lined your parents’ driveway. Or the smell of your dad’s Aqua Velva. For me, it’s the redolent canyon chaparral mingled with the top note of Cherie’s dad’s Jamaican Flowertop. They’re the smells of my misspent youth.
I’ve since lived in many places but somehow always return to L.A. I think of this now only to underscore the point that humans like to return what they know. How else to explain the persistent religion around data modeling conventions? Show me a 3rd normal form fanatic and I’ll show you someone who cut their teeth on E/R diagrams. Show me a waterfall methodologist and I’ll show you someone who’s struggling to embrace agile. This type of closely-held belief system is responsible for much of today’s workplace politics. Show me a marketing department that thinks it owns customer data—“Well, if it weren’t for us, there wouldn’t be any customer data,” one smug segment manager told me—and I’ll show you a CMO who won’t sponsor a data governance program. We’ve always done it that way, after all. Why change now? Why change? Ask your CEO. Then go back to where you came from. I dare you.
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