Reprinted here without permission, my father Dennis Bell‘s 1972 article (impossible to find online in its unabridged form) which was heralded as Canadian Press’ Story of the Year in 1972, and was the source of some controversy. Dad spent a lot of time in Canada’s north exploring and looking for stories, was embroiled in the creation of the Sour Toe Cocktail, and became inexorably tied to the story of Polly the Foul-Mouthed Parrot. In a less-lauded follow-up, Dennis reported that Polly died in November 1972, not long after my dad’s article had been reprinted in hundreds of newspapers all over the world and journalists and tourists began to flock to the Caribou Hotel — this led to speculation that the story was contrived, but my father and the hotel’s proprietors insisted it was 100% (okay, mostly) true. Dad went “viral” decades before that would become a thing. But as with most of his adventures, the story about the story is practically more interesting than the story itself.

Parrot Reformed but Hates Everyone

By Dennis Bell – October 20, 1972

The world famous Carcross Parrot is probably the oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60th parallel—but he remains as this Yukon community’s one claim to international fame.

He hates everybody. Which is understandable, because the damned old buzzard has resided within spitting distance of a beer parlour since 1919 and has had to endure 64 years of beer fumes, drunks who mash soggy crackers through the bars of his cage, and phantom feather pluckers.

The Carcross Parrot seems to have been in the Yukon ever since the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. He is at least 125 years old and has lived in the Caribou Hotel since 1919. He has survived a fire that flattened the premises, fall frost and ferocious winter blizzards and has outlived everyone who ever owned the tiny 22-room hotel. And that’s quite a few people.

The Carcross Parrot gets fan mail. People from as far away as California have heard about him and some have travelled all the way to the Yukon after hearing about him from parents and grandparents.

Bird of Ill Repute

Time was when the Carcross Parrot had a reputation as one of the most formidable drinkers in the North. Tipsy miners used to stagger out of the adjoining beer parlour and slip him a short beer or a scotch neat.

“The parrot used to be quite a drunk,” said Dorothy Hopcott, who has owned the hotel since 1959. “People would come in and give him a few belts. He’d get so drunk he’d fall off his perch and lie on the bottom of the cage with his feet sticking in the air.”

But the parrot got religion. A few owners ago, the hotel was run by a man of piety who toned down the Carcross Parrot’s purple prose and cut off his booze ration. According to the locals, the former owner patiently taught the bird several choruses of Onward Christian Soldier and eventually eliminated the somewhat racy sea chanties from his reportoire.

There’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk, so the saying goes, and the Carcross Parrot is no exception. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his tiny brain, the Parrot associates all adults with his days of ribaldry. 

Squawks at Guests

Nowadays, anyone who comes out of the little six-table pub gets squawked at. Then he turns sullen. Won’t say a word. Polly want a cracker?

“Go to hell,” is the Parrot’s stock answer.
“He can’t stand drunks,” sighed Mrs. Hopcott. “He can smell beer fumes and he gets mad.”

The Parrot’s disposition changes abruptly whenever children are nearby.

Somehow he’s figured out that kids don’t drink. On Sunday mornings when the pub is closed and the restaurant is open, he likes to strike up long involved conversations with children which make absolutely no sense at all.

“He gets down in the corner of his cage and mumbles away to himself,” said Mrs. Hopcott. “A lot of the time we can’t understand him. He’s picked up a lot of strange words and strange accents over the years.”

Nobody is too sure how the bird got to the Yukon, but the first recorded owner was a Captain Alexander, who operated the Engineer Mine near here during the First World War.

The good captain and his lady left the Parrot at the hotel to make a trip to Vancouver in the winter of 1918. They went down with the Princess Sophia, a CPR steamship that sank in the Lynn Canal off Skagway, Alaska, with the loss of all aboard.

The Parrot has lived in the hotel ever since. [END ARTICLE]

Epitaph: Polly is buried in the Carcross Cemetary after a crowded funeral, with a modest plaque.

Famed UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden once said, “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” A considerable body of social science research has explored the positive impacts of athletics, in particular team sports, from youth into adulthood. Playing sports can be a tremendously positive influencer on us physically, emotionally, socially and ethically.

I’ve certainly bought into this idea: I play hockey on several teams three or four times a week. I’ve also invested years of time and money into building RosterBot, a service designed to increase the accessibility and enjoyment of team sports for youth and adult athletes of every skill level.

But when I set out to hire a team to help me carry the company up the hill to future success, and I decided that each of our staff should be a team athlete, my intent was rather more direct. The thinking was that as athletes—and particularly team athletes—each of the crew would be bringing a useful set of perspectives from their own daily experiences with their teams and apply those to building the product. In short, by hiring team athletes, we would be assured they’d be eating their own dog food.

This is largely true. But I actually ignored the rather more significant set of benefits to hiring and working with a crew that is truly inured in team athletics. And since then, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, one I will carry with me as we continue building our team in this company and on to the next venture.

Here’s an interesting study result: the multi-decade U.S. National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 found that men at age 31 who played high school sports were paid 12% more at their jobs than those who did not. That’s compellingly outside the margin of error for such a large sample size.

But hey, money isn’t everything. Multiple studies have shown that sports participation can help build character, encourage emotional growth, and teach players the value of honesty, respect, teamwork, dedication and commitment. Call me crazy, but these are attributes I value in a co-worker.

One of the more frustrating aspects of my time spent working in Silicon Valley during the 1990s technology bubble was working with people who were in it purely for themselves. They were mercenaries and were on board with the plan for as long as it seemed clear that things were moving forward unobstructed. Whenever their startup encountered choppy waters, employees would simply hop over to the next venture-backed vehicle, rather than sticking with it and doggedly facing the opposition.

This job-hopping happens quite often in the current froth in Silicon Valley, too. A friend recently shared with me an unconfirmed but totally believable rumour that the most senior software developer working at Twitter these days has been there only two years. There isn’t even any shame in having a string of 10-month-long employment engagements spanning half-a-dozen companies in Silicon Valley anymore; it’s just par for the course.

I think this is a really big problem. As an employer, and as the captain of an ambitious startup plying the choppy waters of a volatile sea, I’m not interested in mercenaries. I’m interested in people who wake up each morning thinking about how they can build better tools for people just like themselves. I’m interested in co-workers who understand accountability to their teammates, to their coaches, and to their investors and customers. I’m interested in people who will inspire the people around them as well as empower (and enrich) themselves. I’m interested in grinders, playmakers and snipers who work to fill whatever role(s) they can in helping advance the team.

In short, I am now resolved to exclusively hire people who have the emotional makeup to join us for the long haul because they grew up playing, and with luck still play, team sports–whether it’s a business dedicated to sports, or any other.

Startups are hard. You need to be working with a team you’d gladly go to war with. I want to look at everyone around me and know that if we’re under fire, they’ll have me covered. I expect them to hold me to the same account.

For more than a year, this approach has been paying daily dividends in my day-to-day dealings. I suspect that it could lead to long-term success for all of us. In the interim, it’s also helped us to field a pretty good company hockey team.

The key lesson you learn in your first improv workshop is to never say “No.” In improvisational comedy “No” is death of the scene, and negates everything your scene-mate is trying to build within that narrative. “Yes” is always the appropriate response to any question posed to you, and it is from this building block that entertaining (and we hope also hilarious) narratives grow and flourish.

Little did I know that this simple lesson learned in the tenth grade would do me a world of good later on, when it came to running a small team building the world’s coolest startup. When we assembled the RosterBot team for the first time, I gave an introductory presentation on our mission, direction, ways of doing things, and my own personal philosophies of leadership and what it means to work at a technology startup. While I didn’t use the acting allegory (I didn’t want anyone digging up any old VHS tapes), I did find a way to express the same sentiment as it applies to innovation.

I don’t think this is particular to the world of technology startups, but over 25 years of working and socializing with technologists I have come to seperate them along this vector. Four words on a single slide of that (and every future) introductory presentation said it all about the types of people we tend to work with: “Yes if…” and “No because…” I made it pretty clear to my team which one I preferred to surround myself with.

“No because” people tend to be self-appointed experts. If you’ve ever been in a planning or design meeting, you’ve met these people. They crave authority, and their means of asserting that authority is to find a roadblock in something the team is exploring or planning to do. By saying “No because” they instantly come off as the knowledgeable, wise, responsible ones. All attention in the room is diverted away from problem solving to contemplation of your pearls of experience when you use this phrase.

“No because” people snuff the creativity of teams, starving the room of oxygen, whether they mean to or not. More often than not, when you begin to creatively probe a “No because” person, it becomes obvious that they are considering a single or very few reasons for objection to a given idea or direction, and they’re stuck there. In introducing their blocker in this way, they drag the rest of us into their quagmire. Good ideas can become marooned on the rocks of this form of objection. Instead, there’s a better way.

“Yes if” people are oftentimes no closer to a final solution than the naysayers. The way in which they voice the perceived roadblocks identifies that just the same, but does so in a way that encourages contribution. Teams working from a “Yes if” statement can continue to problem-solve as peers, and no self-delegated authority is perceived to be standing in their way. “Yes if” people solve problems in creative ways, invent new things, and find innovative approaches to business opportunities.

“Yes if” people are valuable contributors to problem solving. They extend the plausibility of a solution to any problem, regardless of how ludicrous their “if” condition might actually be. The odds are good, in my experience, that someone will jump in with a slightly less ludicrous means to combat their ludicrous condition. And so, we iterate to solve the problem, jumping from “Yes if” to “Yes if” like lily pads, until the problem is solved.

Every nerd loves the movie Apollo 13 and this one is no exception. In this scene we see the beginnings of the triumph of “Yes if” over “No because”:

The results, as the actual history books show, speak for themselves.  The impossible became possible.

If you truly want to break new ground, chase something innovative or simply tackle the hard problems, you’ll need to banish “No because” from any discussions. And reward every “Yes if” regardless of how ridiculous it may seem. The Yeses have it, every time.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious. Follow him @ianb on Twitter.

For those clamouring for a return of the awesome Martin Mars water bomber(s) to cure B.C.’s current forest fire apocalypse, you may very well see it bombing fires here again.. but there are a few really big problems with that idea.

Problem 1: There’s only ONE Mars

There’s only one flyable Martin Mars remaining. Of the seven produced in the 1940s, only four survived long enough to make it to B.C.

The Marianas Mars crashed while fighting a fire, the Carolina Mars was destroyed in a hurricane, and the Philippine Mars was never upgraded to modern avionics / safety equipment and has more recently been stripped to its (mostly) original configuration as an amphibious transport, so that it can be re-homed to a U.S. Naval Museum in Pensacola.

ONLY the Hawaii Mars remains as a possible tool in this fight. Bearing in mind that there were only seven made because the aircraft never really went into production, and three are destroyed, this means that there are few to no spare parts for this beast when it needs them.

Problem 2: Expensive and SLOW to run

The logistics to support the Mars are now very costly and time-consuming. Its flying speed is quite slow (not much faster than a helicopter) and it’s only able to use large lakes to reload its tanks. So the trip time between drops can be excruciating, and the time frames required to reposition, refuel, and maintain the aircraft (it breaks A LOT) are all similarly frustrating.

It uses four ancient 18-cyl radial engines designed in the 1930s which guzzle special fuel that’s no longer readily available, and for which there are virtually no parts being produced.

Problem 3: Gallons per hour

There is simply NOTHING that has the drop capacity of a Martin Mars. However, in most people’s imaginations, the entire volume of the Mars’ huge airframe can carry water and douse a fire of any scope with ease. This is not true.

Less than 10 per cent of the airframe volume of the Mars actually stores water. That’s still a lot, but the measurement that matters is how many gallons of water/retardant PER HOUR can be dropped by an aircraft.

If the Mars has to make a two-hour round trip to reload its tanks from a large lake, most of the advantage of having such a large tank is lost. The Mars was quite a bit more effective when more than one of these birds could be run against a fire, maintaining a higher frequency of drops.

These days, high capacity helicopters like the Erickson Air-Crane, or nimble planes like the Air Tractor AT-802 making short trips to a land-based tanker or a small lake or river can drop more per hour than a single Mars.

Problem 4: Accuracy and safety

A Mars drop (I’ve seen a few) is nothing short of spectacular. However, the volume of liquid it disperses is enormous, and ground-based firefighters need to clear the area when a drop is about to happen, which interrupts their equally important work.

Couple this with the general lack of accuracy and safety considerations of a slow-moving, lumbering 747-sized aircraft and you’re going to contend with difficulty hitting fires with pinpoint accuracy. Tough to hit a spot fire on a steep slope or in a ravine, for instance.

So in short, petitions and news articles aside: the Martin Mars is an awesome firefighting tool, but its usefulness is mitigated by the fact that it’s a 73-year-old aircraft based on an 80-year-old design using engines, which haven’t been produced in more than 65 years and fuel which is all but extinct.

And since there’s now only a single active copy of this plane, it’s now become obsolete. This is an issue of time and requirements passing a great platform by… not an excuse to call out BC’s Liberal Party for fiddling while Rome burns.

That being said, our airborne firefighting force is currently woefully inadequate. Bringing in the aforementioned Erickson Air-Cranes for example would be an excellent start, and they have been used to great effect in wildfires in California and all over the world.

Here’s a great video of the Mars doing its thing on a fire near Powell River in 2013:

I love the Mars.. it’s incredible to watch. But it belongs in a museum. Coulson Flying Tankers knows it. Which is why the Hawaii Mars sits mostly idle today and is why they’re attempting to trade both the Hawaii and Philippine Mars for decommissioned C-130 Hercules aircraft which can be fitted for firefighting.

Its central character Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) serves as the fast-talking alter-ego to an unnamed wage slave played by Edward Norton, and could be fairly characterized as the film’s prolifically entrepreneurial sparkplug.  Durden offers a set of challenges to the travails of modernity including picking fights with random individuals on the street, and destroying the world’s financial institutions with massive nitroglycerine bombs — much of it under the moniker “Project Mayhem”.

Those particular strategies might not sit well with most of us.  The movie so upset studio executives when it was released in 1999 that marketing budgets were slashed and the exec who greenlit the project was fired — but “Fight Club” has since found a huge following and massive commercial success.

Amid Tyler’s, shall we say, “creative” set of approaches to modern life, however, rest a litany of lessons which will serve you, the real-world entrepreneur, as you set forth growing your business.  If you aspire to nurture your own Project Mayhem to reach or exceed the success of Tyler Durden’s, try following his straightforward advice ripped straight from the movie (my interpretations follow his lines):

TD: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”

IB:  If you’re the kind of person who’s happy defining yourself by titles, semi-monthly pay, the corner office, or the parking spot with your name on it – startups aren’t for you.  You’ll need to get way out of your comfort zone to succeed on your own.  Some of those perks will come along anyway, if you’re successful, but that’s not the real reward.

TD:  “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

IB:  This is akin to Steve Jobs’ advice to “stay hungry; stay foolish”.  You’ll never grow unless you concede that you don’t have all the answers, and until you are able to accept results that differ from what you expect.  This is about putting yourself out there, warts and all, and rolling with the punches.

TD:  “I don’t wanna die without any scars.”

IB:  Seriously, what’s wrong with taking risks?  Your scars denote experience, earned wisdom, and courage.  That latter attribute is what will lead you down the path to success the quickest.  Starting a new business is risky no matter how you play it, so don’t make the mistake of taking the conservative line.

TD:  “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”

IB:  Don’t get caught up believing your own press.  By all means, in many circumstances you’ll have to “fake it until you make it”, but don’t internalize that performance.  You are what you are.  You know your limitations.  You are not yet a chicken, but you’re working to get there… and the second you forget that fact, you’ll jump the shark.  Therefore, stay humble.

TD:  “You choose your own level of involvement.”

IB:  Output is generally a proportional measure of input.  Want the fruits of your effort to succeed?  Work at it.  Work with passion.  Work with focus.  Simply going through the motions, and “putting it on your action items list” doesn’t cut it.

TD:  “Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

IB:  Remember this: You will encounter resistance, friction, and obstacles.  You will be frustrated.  This is part of the journey.  Progress is made one monkey at a time and for a time you will be that monkey, bewildered by the goings on outside your tiny little capsule.  Embrace the challenges that beset you and understand the universe at its worst is benevolent, not malicious.

TD:  “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

IB:  (Confession: This is my favourite).. Know what does not matter? The colour of the sofa in the office lobby.  Or even whether or not you should have an office lobby.  Work on the big stuff, let others sweat the small stuff.  Your mind is a finite resource.  If you’re thinking about frivolities, you’re not thinking about the important issues for exactly that slice of time.  Shame on you.

If you have not read it, the movie is very faithful to Chuck Pahlaniuk’s original book… it’s worth a quick weekend of reading.  There are many lessons for living simply, and the book confronts our relationship with material possessions head-on.  Most importantly a major objective of “Fight Club” is to inspire those of us who might seek to leave their mark on the planet (hopefully constructively) to get off the couch and get things moving.  Let’s hope that, whatever your vision of the future looks like, that inspiration touches you.

** this article was originally published under another, much worse title at Profit Magazine.

McKayla is NOT impressed with Mickey Mantle.

 McKayla knows the rug really tied the room together.

McKayla would have preferred to see the White House bowling alley.

McKayla thinks Kanye is way out-of-line.

McKayla thought the World Trade Center tour was really boring.

In Memory of Dennis Neil Bell, died June 27, 2012

… a gifted and brilliant storyteller and adventurer. Treasured by his peers in newsrooms all around Canada who enjoyed his candour, wit, and wisdom. My father never let the weird prevent him from uncovering the wonderful.

For most of my youth he served as chapter President of the Big Time Mountaineering Club, whose most noteworthy achievement was having never climbed a mountain.

Well, that isn’t really true: he shared his love of the outdoors with his family and friends. He took me high into the Kananaskis, following the river to Turbine Canyon, which is where his ashes will be dispersed.

Many journalists from across the country reached out to pay tribute to Dennis when he passed away… here are a couple of the public tributes:

http://bit.ly/LyYqA2

Miss you, Dad. — at New Westminister BC.

Why not reflect on that advice this Valentine’s Day?  And in addition to loving someone you see and love every day, love a stranger.

Think for a moment that the same person whom you loved as a teen is that same person who you chatted with in the elevator this morning, and is also the same person who cut you off in traffic yesterday. Imagine that the same woman that helped you retrieve your makeup when it spilled from your purse at the grocery store is the same man who kissed you this morning as he tied his necktie before leaving for work while you curled up for 9 more minutes of snooze time — and that same barista who smiles and delivers your Americano in the morning is the same man who plays his music way too loud in the condo next door on weekends.

The human animal’s single most significant differentiator from most of the rest of the creatures roaming this planet is the capacity to love, and to do so deeply. Love binds us together in groups, it is the root of so many of our fears, and it is the essence of our morality. We people are all borne of the same elemental DNA and treading upon this same earth, breathing air and sipping rain and trudging through snow and mud and dust together. In these ways, and in so many more, we are all connected… our fates endlessly intertwined in a complex web of co-dependency.  We are here for no other reason than to help each other.

Go to this place of connectedness. Visit it often. See the eyes of a former lover in the gaze of a soldier. See the compassion of your kindergarten teacher in the gesture of a tax auditor. See the mercy of your mother in a homeless child.

Observe closely: every nuance of a person you are seeing for the first time evokes a memory of a person you have known before.  That, dear readers, is not a coincidence.  It is a reminder.

All people need your love. All people need your compassion. We are truly one people.

“Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”

 – Wayne Dyer

I intend to make a more deliberate effort to remember these words, and to live by them, going forward.

Thanks to Derek Shanahan for inspiring this post with his treatise today.

This was likely their way of addressing the rather dramatic deflation of that facility in the winter of 2007, when the ceiling literally collapsed during a storm.   This sounded like a good idea — it was anchored on attracting a Major League Soccer franchise to the city and for PavCo was designed to foil proposals for a ~$70M, 20,000 seat shoreline stadium fronted by Greg Kerfoot et al, owners of that MLS franchise (the Whitecaps). BC Place opened in 1984 and has never once turned a profit.  Presently it loses approximately $6.3M per year of taxpayer dollars.  It was built for Expo ’86 and was designed as a modernist building in an era when the city around it was humble and underdeveloped — a shining example of the future, or what we thought it might hold architecturally, way back in 1980.

In the intervening 30 years, the City of Vancouver has very much grown up around it, both physically and spiritually.  Many glass and brick (honouring Yaletown’s storied history) buildings have grown up around it, and as a result BC Place now stands as an architectural anachronism casting its giant hulking bare concrete mass amidst what might otherwise be termed a neighbourhood.

I think I am not speaking out of turn when I suggest that it is objectively, fundamentally, and irreparably ugly. At $150M though, retrofitting this beast with a retractable roof (which it always should have had) seemed more sensible than a new stadium which we were told could cost 3x-4x as much — of taxpayer dollars, of course.  So there we set the course.  Fund it.  Build it.  Move on.

Had this been any other city, any other country, or any other province it might have ended there.   But of course it hasn’t. By January 2009, this $150M price tag was inflated to $365M.   Construction costs for the roof and supporting structure were attributed to “seismic upgrades”, “plumbing”, and other euphemisms to mask the fact that the project began experiencing overruns even prior to commencement.   Then by the end of 2009 it was announced that the official budget was now $458M… with no mention made of earthquakes or plumbing. This now exceeded the cost of the proposed Whitecaps stadium (which was also to have a retractable roof) by 650%.

… and now rivalled the cost of building brand new structures around the world with retractable roof capabilities and much, much more.   Munich’s Allianz Arena, which I toured just after it opened, was completed in 2006 for a cost of €286M and seats 60,000.   That stadium houses two Futbol teams and is near capacity for every event.   In a disastrous project gone wrong, the good citizens of Indianapolis still ended up with a massive 70,000 seat stadium and conference centre for the bargain price of $700M (and which actually looks like it might fit in nicely in Yaletown).  By comparison, BC Place has 50,000+ seats — but it has almost never been full in 25 years of operational history.

Kerfoot’s earlier proposal highlighted the fact that Vancouver doesn’t need a 50,000 seat stadium.   So to get to a stadium of the size we really need?

An example might be Seattle’s SafeCo Field, which seats 30,000 for football, at a price tag of about $516M 10 years ago. But not us.   We didn’t need a huge stadium but we’ve got one, and now we’re doubling down on a 30-year-old bad bet by Bill Bennett which, it was revealed today, doesn’t even work in the rain.   That’s right.   We live in the rainiest big city in North America, and the retractable roof cannot retract in the rain. So… let’s see.   We’re spending more than the cost of building a brand new stadium that could be designed to fit into the neighbourhood around it.

And as the curtain is lifted on the publicly-funded project it’s becoming quite clear that the finished product is doomed to cast a huge, ugly shadow over the entire city, doesn’t function as promised, and has a capacity hugely in excess of that which we need.   Have I got everything correct? Thought so.

** UPDATE Nov. 5/2010 – Bob Mackin reveals the new price tag is now an unconfirmed $563M.