Seven years ago. It was a non-teaching day for me at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. The cab driver who dropped me off at school from a breakfast meeting was from Kabul. He had NPR running, and we caught versions of the events on the 9 am news. Little did he or I know the dramatic change that would come upon the America we knew.

I remember the horror–the darn lump in my throat wouldn’t go away–as I watched the chaos unfold on TV. I had worked on Wall Street a few years ago, and knew the WTC quite well.

All we can do today, is to take a moment to reflect on the precious and innocent lives that were lost in the thousands that day. May they be blessed in every way.

After many months of co-directing and volunteering (with my wife) on a child literacy project in Hyderabad, India through DukeEngage, I’m back. The project was exhilirating but also exhausting–apart from the literacy work in underpriviliged government schools, we were also  in charge of 8 Duke undergrads. But I would not trade it for anything. I learned many lessons for the ISmarts and LSmarts framework. I am back to innovation and leadership consulting and will blog regularly now.

I have never been convinced by Tom Friedman’s “Flat World” argument. The concept of a “flat world” has always seemed to me to be part of the fashionable jargon one bandies around over glasses of expensive wine at parties while the poor all over the world live in their deep holes untouched by digital revolutions. Over the last couple of weeks, I myself fell into the hollows of the flat world. First, my hosting service provided spotty service for two days, and I couldn’t update this blog. Then, on travel, I had turtle-speed access to the Internet, and the lesser I write about that frustration, the better. Finally, as I sat without Internet or wireless access in a fantastically modern hospital in Durham, NC, where my 5-year old daughter had taken us scared about her “strange” flu, I saw how rosy Friedman’s view of the world is.

Incidentally, here’s what I will be doing for 8 weeks this summer: helping my wife on a child literacy project in India.