cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. and Diane Cluff.
"Well this was the week of my seminar: Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration. Last week I mentioned I was putting in quite a bit of time getting ready for the seminar. Sunday after church and after getting my Thoughtlet off, I started working on the seminar again. Guess I quit about 2:30. I was working on it so hard, I didn't notice the time until about 11:00 Houston time and missed my weekly call to both Grandma and Mom. I'm sorry! I got up, took Rachel to Seminary, and went on in to work on the seminar. It was a very busy Monday, with a lot of effort and not five minutes to rest all day. I was going to work until late, when Andrea called and said Larry was bringing a guest to Family Home Evening. So I packed up my computer and came home. We had a sparsely attended, and yet spiritually good Family Home Evening. Larry's friend from work was not able to come. After Family Home Evening I was so tired I just went to sleep.
About 10:30 PM Jeff Hume called and said he was possibly going to cancel the seminar. We had lost one of the major disk drives, the collaboration tests were not as good as we wanted, I was not going to be able to show either Landmark nor GeoQuest at the same time we were using the environment for Teraviz or CoReExplorer(tm), and there were only about 8 paying customers. I understood, and just went back to sleep. Didn't even mention the conversation to Andrea. The next morning I slept in until 5:45 AM and so Andrea took Rachel to Seminary. I left before she got back, and went in to finish off some of the pages, for the handouts and to get things started. Andrea joined me about 7:30, and sat through me talking all day long. She recorded what was said, and this will be typed up and will possibly become the basis of a new book by the same title as the seminar: `Maps, Modeling, Immersion, and Collaboration.'
At about 7:45 AM Jeff called in and was getting a status from all of the folks helping get things ready for the seminar. They were again talking about whether to cancel the seminar or not. I had prepped Peter Duncan about my reaction to our `management by jerking people around.' The seminar `Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration' went off as if it had always intended to be given. Many of the people attending were late arriving. One missed the collaborative session with London. One never made it. The attendees were very bright. From Schlumberger was the editor of The Oilfield Review, a member of the GeoQuest planning staff, and the Product Manager for GeoViz. The Leading Edge had one of their editors in attendance. Mobil was represented by Lloyd Weathers, who was in the same group of 18 I was in when we started at Mobil in the summer of 1974. Exxon Production Research, Nippon Oil, and my friend Dennis McMullin were the other attendees. Also Bjorn Wygrala, the basin modeler from IES in Julich Germany, was in attendance, and he gave a 30 minute presentation/demonstration of his software.
There were several folks from Continuum who helped pull it all together. Mike Yates did most of the flying, and he also pulled down digital video files from Arco and presented them as if they were planned. Peter Duncan gave a great introduction with his SPE inspired Fantasy Model. Linda Renner demonstrated how we can use here well planning software to save $20-40 million in the location of a platform in this type of an environment. Dr. Dave Monk gave a great presentation on multi-attribute 3-D seismic data. Michelle Anderson greeted everyone, gave them invoices, had the breakfast, breaks, and lunch all set up and on queue. Jim Vetter wrote out the invoices. Susan Crawford and her daughter copied and spiral bound the 107 page notebook: Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration. Susan even took all 15 copies apart and replaced two pages (4 PowerPoint slides) which were printed wrong.
I had good attention during the lectures, reasonable questions, and there was a lot of discussion about the material during breaks and after. In fact, the GeoQuest guys didn't leave until about 5:45 PM, and they were talking to John Amason, Jeff Hume, Peter Duncan, and some of the other folks. I believe we cracked open the door for several million dollars worth of business with Schlumberger as a results of the seminar: Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration. It very much reminded me of all of the seminars I would teach when we were starting Landmark up. For those who don't realize it, this was the reason I was gone so much of the time those who were with me then were growing up. This type of seminar was one of the reasons Landmark was positioned so well and was so successful. The seminars I headed up in those days included: New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics; Interactive Interpretation; Interactive Sequence Stratigraphy; etc. Whenever you are introducing a new technology (product or service), it is really important to train the market in all of the reasons why they need to purchase the technology. It is truly amazing to me how little imagination most people have, and how willing they are to keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and again and again.
Andrea left about 4:30. The last of the participants left about 6:00. I cleaned up the immersive theater where we held the seminar, and went upstairs to catch up on e-mail, review the evaluation forms, and recover. There was an e-mail about how much the seminar lost, and how many need to be in attendance next time we give the seminar to make break-even. It was really quite disheartening. I shared my feelings with Peter Duncan. He, like me, saw the the tremendous market making potential and value of the seminar. Particularly in opening doors with Schlumberger. On Wednesday morning Jeff Hume took me aside and told me how pleased he was with how Maps, Models Immersion, and Collaboration turned out. He had spent time with the Schlumberger folks, and he realized the value of their response to the seminar. It even helped get folks tuned in for the big Enron presentation Wednesday morning. We had about 12 major Enron folks visit. They asked for 5 minutes alone in the theater after the demonstrations. They are going to be getting a portable immersive theater which can be carried around in their corporate jet. They are going to use this with their big fields in India and China to allow collaboration with the U.S. office. In general, it appears that they have recognized the value at the corporate level. They will also be bringing in the top corporate officers to see what we have done and to tell them how it will help Enron. Jeff was very positive in telling the other Continuum folks about his reservations about the seminar and how well it turned out.
In the afternoon Richard Uden and I introduced the environment to a good old boy oil finder, who represents a family who are investing a few million dollars in drilling. They are looking at taking the Rudman farm-out opportunity we have been using for demonstrations the last couple of years. It is interesting moving from talking about collaboration across the globe, to talking to someone who makes all decisions based on a map that they personally generate.
Wednesday evening the Enron kind of forward thinking continued at Young Men's. We only had 4 young men in attendance, and Gary Jones gave them an excellent introduction to software development as part of a career night. Gary invented something he called McSub's, and had the guys go through the thought-processes to design screens to automatically create sandwiches. It was fun to watch the guys go through the process of thinking like a computer, recognizing what needed to be input, and what needed to be passed on to whoever was making the sandwiches. It was a successful meeting, other than the fact there were not very many of our group in attendance. It is really hard to put together a good youth program when the youth are too busy to participate. Oh well.
Thursday's sales forecast meeting was sparsely attended. Ridyard was in Australia. Jeff was in London. Peter was in California. Mike Yates was downstairs working on collaboration with London. Jim Vetter, Dave Monk, and I were the Houston participants. It wasn't as good of a meeting as the previous week. The day was one of catch-up, and was somewhat of a let down after all of the effort to get ready for Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration. I picked up the missionaries for dinner. Grandma Shirts had flown in from Cedar City earlier in the day, and so she was with us for dinner. One of the Elder's is from Fountain Green, Utah, which is close to where the Shirts' lived prior to Andrea's birth. I took Matt to soccer practice, and slept in the car while he was practicing.
Friday we had the developer's meeting, there was a teleconference with Roger Anderson and Steve Joseph about CES, LLC, I helped the good old boy interpreter working on the Rudman prospect, and I spent a few hours interpretating the Salt 3-D seismic survey. It was nice to have a little bit slower day. There was a very concerned call from Jeff in London about cash, and I will wait to talk about all of that stuff until the cards play out. Friday evening Matt and I went on our first campout together. It was at Stephen F. Austin State Park, where we went skinny dipping 12-14 years ago, where we had several Fathers and Son's campouts, and where I wrote several of the camping songs. We set up the tents, and it was my first time to see the wonderful big two room tent Andrea has. I hope we get a lot of use out of it starting this fall and then next spring. Melanie and Sara and Rob, maybe you would be interested in going camping with us sometimes? While the scouts cooked dinner and played capture the flag I played the guitar and sang to myself. Matt came over about 4 times and had me sing the song I wrote for him. He had a good time Friday evening. It was a little harder for him with the structured activities on Saturday morning. And it still turned out OK. We got back just in time to go to his soccer game. Grandma Shirts came out and watched the game from the car (the sun is still pretty stong here in Texas). I left the game on the run, and drove too fast to get home for a CES conference call. It lasted from 4:00-5:30. Looks like we might have some stuff come together for CES over the next couple of weeks (and I've said that before). We went out for a nice dinner at Landry's last night, and spent the rest of the evening at home.
Today was pretty slow. There was another CES teleconference call from 8:00 until 9:00. For those entrepreneurs among you, you can check out the summary of what we are working on now at two sites: http://www.ces-enterprise.com or http://www.walden3d.com/ces. We fasted with Melanie today. Church was nice. Matthew Salt is leaving for his mission in Colorado and the Salt's gave some wonderful talks. Melanie, I have asked Sarah Salt to type out her talk so I can e-mail it to you. It was based on a letter her Grandpa sent her about eternal marriage, and I felt like you would really enjoy it. We had a new Priest join our group today, and he seems like a really neat guy. Seems older than he actually is. This afternoon we talked, Andrea cooked Sara's chicken casserole (Sara, she would like to have the recipe written down if you wouldn't mind e-mailing it to me). This evening we went to Matthew's open house, talked to the Slacks for a while, and then went to the first practice for the annual Christmas program with Epiphany (../9750.html). It is hard to believe it is already that time of year. If any of you can come to Houston to hear us sing, it is on Sunday evening the 12th of December this year.
As you map your life, I hope you realize the multiple dimensions and their interactions, all of which combine to comprise the model of your life. As you immerse youself in living, don't forget there are things you can learn by collaborating with others and learning from the lessons they have learned. There is a significant philosophy behind the title of my seminar this week, and I hope that those of you who take the time to read these words also take the time to think through the implications of replacing maps with models, and including in your immersion in life collaboration with those you trust and respect.
Lastly, as I was finishing this Thoughtlet off, Matt came in and wanted to write everyone a message:how ya doing partner? MATT NIELSON. You can respond to Matt via my e-mail address for right now."