Crazy Talk

Welcome to the Kerika blog. And keep your fingers crossed: this is my first attempt at writing a public blog, even if it isn't my first attempt at pontificating online.

Back in the late 90s, when I was with Morgan Stanley in New York, I was asked to become an internal evangelist for the Internet. The fellow who was CIO told me: "I have a feeling the Internet is going to be big. Some folks understand what this is all about, but some don't. I just don't want it to be said that the Internet came along on my watch and we missed the boat. So go out there and make sure everyone gets on board with this whole Internet thing."

That started me off on one of my more frustrating assignments: I had no idea how to evangelize something that I saw as being blindingly obvious in the first place. After stumbling through the process for a while, I decided to create an Intranet site where I would post a small essay every day. These little missives would highlight how other companies -- mostly big companies, the kind one might expect to be stodgy and regressive -- were getting on board with this "whole Internet thing", thereby suggesting -- ever so politely -- that maybe it was OK for a large, traditional investment bank to get with the program as well.

That was a lot of fun. I found out there were all these folks in the bank, flying below the radar in the sense that they weren't senior poobahs, who were very interested in how the firm could embrace E-Business. My little essays found a receptive audience among people I had never met, and that was very rewarding and encouraging: suddenly I didn't feel like I was pushing that rock up the hill all by myself.

I didn't know it at the time, because we didn't really have any name for the process of writing a series of short online essays with links to supporting materials, but I was blogging...