My weekly blog post

     I appreciate regular readers of my weekly blog post and especially those who share the posts with others. The process I have used to deliver posts to you and another 1,000 subscribers is about to go through a major change. I will explain this below, but I thought I would first add some context about how and why I have been writing the posts.

For my first 50 years, I never considered myself to be a good writer. My roots were in tinker toys, erector sets, electronics kits, and ham radio. When I got to engineering school, I was surprised to see English 1 was a required part of the curriculum. I managed to pass the course, but it was far from my favorite. After joining IBM in 1967 as a technical sales representative, I focused on the business problems of my customers and how to solve them with IBM data processing equipment. At times this required a written proposal, but IBM had plenty of boilerplate materials and templates which made it easy.

In 1969, I was drafted into the U.S. Army where I spent two years, six months, and 22 days in service. My only writing consisted of letters to my wife while I was in basic training. I told her about the torture I was going through as I went from 225 pounds to 150 pounds.

My boss in Armonk was Dr. Leonard Liu. Leonard was a brilliant computer scientist. He was responsible for development of IBM’s Systems Network Architecture (SNA) which could be considered a precursor to the Internet. It was adopted by almost all major companies around the world. Leonard was responsible for putting organizational proposals in front of the CEO and Board of Directors of IBM. As his assistant, I helped to develop presentations which he would take to the top of the company. I learned a lot about communications from Leonard. He would say, “Presentations to people at the top need to be precise, well organized, and clear. Consider them fifth graders”.

My next assignment was Director of Pricing for the IBM Credit Corporation, a new organization, founded by a handful of finance executives. I was one of the early executives to help create IBM’s own leasing company supporting the hardware sales to our customers, a new and complex undertaking. I developed financial models with spreadsheets, not known to many people at the time. Using the communications skills I had learned from Leonard, I would make presentations to other IBM executives to explain how the nuts and bolts of lease pricing would work. The clear communications worked and enabled the Credit Corporation to gain the support from above and across the company.

I used my “Leonard techniques” of communication to describe the situation and recommend what to do about it. The presentation was a home run. Top management understood what I proposed and endorsed it for implementation as soon as possible. Afterward, one of my senior people stopped in my office and said she was overwhelmed by how clear the presentation was. She said she was impressed how the clear explanation of the problem led to a successful meeting, and added it was the most effective communication she had seen in her career. She convinced me I had an important skill I had not thought about.

Communications skills served me quite well during the remainder of my career. I found the most important example was explaining the Internet to executives who had no idea what it was, how it worked, and why it was important. Although hard to believe today, in the early 1990s, relatively few people knew anything about the Internet and the World Wide Web. After I first saw a demonstration of the Web, I was convinced it was the future. Everything would be accessible through the Internet and the Web, and everyone would have access to it. In late 1993, I wrote a paper called “Get Connected”. It was about how companies could open themselves up, become more accessible, and increase their communications capabilities dramatically by using the Internet. The ideas would seem trivial today, but they were groundbreaking at the time.

I first talked about “Get Connected” outside of IBM at the Internet World conference in early December 1994 in Washington, DC. The response was heartening. I was flooded with emails from people, outside and inside of IBM, asking me for copies of the presentation. This is when I got the idea to create my own Web site. The motivation was twofold initially. It was to share the presentation materials and to facilitate electronic discussion with people who would inspire me, critique me, and generally provide valuable input which in turn I could use to inspire others inside and outside of IBM.

The initial website at ibm.com/patrick was modest. It was the only web page at ibm.com belonging to one person. The home page had a link to download my presentations. This saved my administrative assistant a lot of time from no longer mailing copies of the presentation. The site had a few links to a handful of IBM product offering web pages, and a list of my top ten favorite Web sites. The idea of a website owner sharing links to their favorite sites became in vogue by the mid 1990s. Creating web pages today is simple but in the early 90s it was a difficult technical task.  I ultimately expanded “My Favorite Places” to dozens of categories and more than 1,000 links. Many people found my favorites list useful in the early 1990s. Yahoo! obviated the need in 1994 and Google emerged in 1998.

As the site evolved, I was encouraged by many emails from visitors and constant feedback, ideas, and technical assistance from several IBM colleagues. I added sections about my hobbies: gadgets, running, GPS, music, and technology. With help from my team, I added a Photo Gallery with nearly 1,000 high quality digital pictures. There were no smartphone cameras or photo apps until almost ten years later. In 1996, I began to write short stories I called “Reflections” and put them on the website.

Reflections were about meetings with an IBM customer, visits to a university campus, speeches I gave at technology conferences, thoughts about some issue of the day, or something new I had learned. Reflections were not an attempt to be profound but simply a way to share. My Reflections were a precursor to blogging, and shortly after I started writing Reflections, blogging software came on the market, and I was an early adopter. I converted all Reflections into the blogging format which exists today at johnpatrick.com/blog. As of April 2025, the site included almost 2,500 posts in nearly 100 categories.

When I retired from IBM at the end of 2001, I had several goals, including joining boards of directors, giving speeches about the future of the Internet, continuing to write stories for my website, and writing books. I feel fortunate I was able to achieve all these goals. My first book was Net Attitude: What It Is, How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can’t Survive Without It. It was published in late 2001 by Perseus Publishing. I have since written six more books, all part of what I named the Attitude Series.

Over the years, I have developed a process for writing and sharing my weekly blog posts. Usually on Tuesday I start thinking about what topic I write about. On Wednesday I would nail down the topic and on Thursday complete the writing. I use software called WordPress to write the blog post. At noon on Friday, WordPress publishes the new post on johnpatrick.com. Using software called blog2social the post also goes to Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. On Saturday morning at 6am, a web service called Mailchimp distributed the post to approximately 1,000 subscribers. Mailchimp has also provided the web services to allow readers to subscribe or unsubscribe.

Mailchimp raised their price for their services to a level which made no sense for me. I dropped them and moved to one of their competitors called MailerLite. It does all the same things as Mailchimp and for 1,000 subscribers or less, their service is free. Today’s blog post is the first to go out using the new system. There could be glitches for the transition. Hopefully, you will hardly notice any difference.

The full story of my writing career is in Reflection Attitude.