Well, more a metaphor of a watermelon.

Okay, it’s a massive book that uses a watermelon as its central metaphor.

For the past couple years, my long-running project with co-author Lynne G. Segall has been an overwhelming priority. You know the old joke about the dog that chases the car, then actually catches the car? Ruh roh!

That was us: after chasing around, looking for the right publisher for our manuscript about problem-solving … we caught one!

And thanks to that great team at Ideapress, we now have a book. “Don’t Smash the Watermelon!” arrives on August 18. But not without a few intense, deadline-filled years of final development, revisions, interior design, line-editing, layout, cover design, proofreading, test printing, market strategizing and more.

And it’s not as if the book project, as massive and draining as it has been, was the only thing going on in our lives. Lynne still serves as a full-time faculty member and Associate Dean at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, from which I launched this so-called retirement of mine.

And said retirement happens to include several musical projects (resulting in eight album releases in as many years), some carefully-curated returns to the classroom (including teaching two courses at the Yale School of Management, one of my alma maters), the first 150,000 words of a novel, and a move to North Carolina.

Enough about excuses, more about expectations: I expect to resume writing and sharing articles here, as well as on the new Substack that Lynne and I have just created, now that that 450-page boulder of a book is about to roll merrily on whatever path lies ahead for it. I might even share some early chapters of that novel. And of course I’ll bug you about my new music.

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Don't Smash the Watermelon!

The process & principles of high-impact problem solving, from authors Patrick S. Noonan and Lynne G. Segall. A new guide to business problem-solving with impact, published August 2026 by Ideapress. "... success without the mess ..."

By Patrick S. Noonan

• Early in my academic career at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, I was asked to give a public lecture in the university’s “Great Teachers Lecture Series.”

• The Internet was pretty new, and electronic commerce was still in its niche phase. Most people still had no idea about it.

• In addition to thinking about the business implications of the web, I already had begun to ponder a lot - and worry a bit - about some of the bigger implications for society.

• I decided to use my lecture to inform the audience about what was right around the bend for e-commerce and business and their own lives as consumers… and then to drop a bomb about what the further future might bring.

Fast forward to May 2023: Twenty-five years have passed. The world has changed… and continues to change rapidly.

For example, it seems that every day now we’re hearing about astonishing new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) - and learning about troubling new abuses and unintended consequences.

Perhaps we’re also starting to notice how 25 years of technological progress, leading to ubiquitous information and info tools, might be nudging our long-standing economic order and social contracts off their foundation.

Did I foresee this, miss it, see things that didn’t actually come to pass?

For the first time, I am sharing the text of that talk. We can pick at it and see for ourselves. Let’s begin!

I began that evening with a twist: My opening words did not appear to be directed at the assembled audience.

Instead, I started speaking as if to my two sons, then 8 and 10 years old. (Spoiler alert: These fellas made a significant appearance a bit later in the talk, most notably as the principal players in an anecdote that set up the entire “so what” section.)

Dear Paul and Will,

I hope you are having a good evening, and that you are treating the babysitter well, as is your practice… even when it’s Jessica, who ruthlessly executes our instructions to get you to bed early on school nights. 

You’re approaching that age where kids’ hearing is extremely selective. But I think you know that your mother and I are over at Emory tonight, where I have been honored with an invitation to give a special lecture.  (In fact, at this very moment, while you are reading this letter, there are people in the audience who are wondering whether I have pulled out the wrong set of notes.)

That was probably true. I recall a small sigh of relief from audience members who were starting to worry about me, or possibly fretting about their commitment to spending the evening listening to me.

Oh, I did not actually leave them this text as a “letter” for bedtime reading. That was an exercise of dramatic license.

I continued with a nod to my hosts:

This talk is for Emory’s “Great Teachers Lecture Series,” not part of one of my classes. Emory has a long tradition of excellent educators and great speakers, so it has been not only an honor to have been selected from among such a talented group of colleagues, but also a source of anxiety off and on during the past year.

I really have wrestled with the responsibility of delivering a lecture that meets the high standards of this series.

You two really haven’t spent any time in my classrooms since that one day almost five years ago - you were not much more than babies - when you strolled into my Harvard Business School classroom. You had come to help my HBS students mark the end of my very first year of teaching. Although you were expecting to make me the center of attention, it turned out to your distress that all eyes fell on you as you made your entrance. (Will, you almost dashed out the door in a panic!)

Even so, I’d bet that after nearly 8 and 10 years of family life with me, including close and direct observation of me in the roles of baseball coach and Cub Scout Leader, you could guess that my teaching style is not based on giving grand, formal lectures.

A little more riffing about my teaching and learning philosophy, and that of many of my faculty colleagues. It’s somewhat relevant right here, but it actually it’s a subtle setup for later, for after I’ve served up my provocative central question.

Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ve never given a lecture of the sort that’s typical for this series, or the classroom norm for others who teach outside the Business School.

Basically, I don’t do lectures. Nor do many of my B-school colleagues.

Your mother and I have talked about how AMS, your Arbor Montessori School, and GBS, our Goizueta Business School, are a lot alike: In neither place would you find long rows of desks, caricatured in many of those old videos we’ve all watched together. There are no restless students anchored in place, a chain gang whose boredom is broken only by a fire-hose of pronouncements from some imperious teacher, spouting on and on from the self-proclaimed place of honor at the front of the room.

Our MBA students don’t physically roam around our rooms during our classes, selecting interesting-looking lesson materials to explore and master on their own, as you do in your Montessori classrooms, but they do the mental equivalent. At GBS, the “case method” is a common type of “student-centered learning,” which offers them the freedom to wonder and challenge, but also demands that they take responsibility for their own learning. 

Our role at the front of our classrooms is still that of the experts, but our students’ success as managers and leaders depends less on their knowing precisely what we experts know - things we could just write down in a book, by the way, and have them read on their own ­- and more on their being able to find their own way to think and make decisions as effectively as we do.

This requires them to develop professional judgment and the ability to be good problem solvers in settings where no two problems are ever the same. 

Good management doesn’t arise from rote learning and the simple transfer of knowledge from expert to novice, so we throw them into tough, ambiguous problems, lead penetrating discussions and force them to think critically -­ and with an orientation toward action.

Now a little riff to pivot to the expected topic of the evening: electronic commerce.

So my point is that the teaching awards that have come my way were not the result of a filing cabinet chock-full of stirring lectures. That fact alone will make tonight a challenge for me: I can’t just recycle!

Even worse, the subjects I do teach ­- decision analysis, modeling uncertainty and risk, data analysis, game theory, the economics of negotiation, and so forth -­ are not obvious choices of material.  In fact, they’re probably the last things these people want to hear about on a nice night out of the house.  They’re not even what our MBA students think they want upon arrival, although we do manage to turn them around. 

My success as an educator, I think, has come from being able to do precisely that ­- inspire the realization that clear, critical thinking about decision making and information will be an essential element of their professional development and success.

Let’s put this one in the Win column, shall we? We didn’t yet use the word “analytics,” but I do believe I was right in predicting the coming wave of data- and decision-sciences, and how important it would become to business professionals.

Unfortunately, [learning] that is a long road, built on many weeks of their (often painful) wrestling with difficult cases and new analytical tools, and not at all suitable for a public lecture, whose purpose is, I am told, to leave people feeling good when they walk out. 

And the people in tonight’s audience will be a diverse lot from around the community, so there’s no simple dipping into my cache of research conference papers, either. There is simply nothing in my files that could serve, even with a bit of tailoring, as the basis of the kind of lecture those people expect tonight.

So right after my selection for this series, when the University’s Director of Communications, Jan Gleason (you know her - Tyler and Corbin and Katie’s mom), called me to ask what I was going to talk about, what my title would be… I was nearly stumped. 

After the brief moment of thought that she allowed me, I rested on a topic I had been thinking and writing about a lot at the time and have continued to do so since.  The title that sprang to mind, in one of those blinding and inexplicable moments of inspiration, was this: “Whither Humanity?  The Individual in the Electronic Marketplace.”

You see, the “whither” part is a bit of a joke. It’s an artificially fancy way of saying “to where,” as in, “to what place or condition is humankind headed?”

But it also sounds as if maybe it contains its own answer, as in “we’re withering away and losing our essence.” 

The “Electronic Marketplace” part, well, I’ll start tonight’s lecture by explaining that.

Finally, the promise of some content! The following section was a quick look-around at where e-commerce was, at that time:

People - everyday people - are starting to notice that new mall that has been thrown together on the edge of our senses over the past couple of years. 

It’s a virtual mall, it’s still brand new - new stores are emerging from behind the virtual plywood every day - and the only access road is electronic.  So its sales are still only a small portion of our total shopping consumption, but it is growing and already represents a large amount of dollars.

The games and books and yo-yos our family has bought there are just a small piece of what shoppers from all over the country are doing.  In the last quarter of 1997, seven million households bought $1 billion worth of stuff in this mall, both double the same period in 1996.  This year they will spend almost $5 billion, and their frequency of purchase will double again.

Computers are found in a little less than half of US households, but this is rising fast and will surpass 60% in four years.  Thanks to new under-$1,000 computers, that will include a lot more middle class and working class families; most of next year’s new buyers will have incomes of less than $50,000.

Only one quarter of US households can reach that online “access road,” but that is also growing fast, and already more than half of those online households have done at least some price research - some window shopping - using the Internet.

What are people buying?…

Hold on a second.

At the time I was speaking, annual Internet spending in the US had risen to $5 billion in 1997. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2022 they spent 200x as much - over $1 trillion. To put that into perspective, that’s now about 1 dollar of every 7 dollars of retail spending.

The same source puts 2023 computer ownership at approximately 93%. Broadband and wireless services mean that computers are almost never isolated islands. Also, note that 85% have a smart phone, a device that didn’t even exist at the time of my talk.

Access to those “access roads” is essentially universal now. But remember, the iPhone didn’t debut until 2007. Heck, in May of 1998, Google was still four months away from even incorporating as a company.

Taking a view back from 2023, perhaps all this seems inevitable. But believe me: The idea that, say, two-thirds of the population of the entire world would soon own a smart phone was a major stretch. Understanding the underlying technologies and extrapolating the trends, yes, that’s what the crystal ball was hinting at. But it was very, very hard to get our minds to imagine the full, rich reality that would accompany this ubiquity of pocket devices.

In the next post, I’ll continue by “naming names.” Who was doing exactly what in the nascent web of 1998?

Oh, this will be fun! How many of the companies that I name in that section, do you suppose, are even still in business? (I will warn you that if you are the sort of person who forms emotional attachments to brands and companies, you should bring tissues.)

I’ll also get to that promised anecdote, which falls in the “wisdom of children” pantheon. I still recall the feeling, almost an electric shock, when my grade-school age boys laid bare the future… and got me to worrying about their futures, and thinking hard about what I, as a father, needed to do about them.

And that’s the real meat of this talk, and the reason I found it worth revisiting right now.

Hope to see you in the next installment! Thanks for reading.

On business, sure, a layup - I was at that time an associate professor at the Goizueta Business School and dean of its MBA programs. “Electronic commerce” was full of exciting new prospects, thanks to the rapid explosion of the Internet in the preceding 5 years, so nearly every aspect of running an enterprise was headed for change. Grist for the mill there, no doubt.

But also the experience of being a consumer was about to evolve, unbeknownst to most of the people who would be coming to this talk. It would be a good public service to give them a look at what had already been happening, what was now available to them, and what lay ahead.

And it seemed to me that the forces at play were not some one-time, step-function type of jolt. A shock that would play out and then stabilize at some new normal. Rather, this was just the latest consequence of what had been an inexorable and exponential growth in the capability of our information tools. (“Moore’s Law” is one manifestation of this. We’ll get into that in the talk itself.)

For that reason, I decided to use my talk to pull back the metaphorical camera and give the audience a bigger picture, and then a bigger picture still. How is life in our society going to change as a result of the developments that already were about to upend commerce?

My ability to have a coherent point of view on this - indeed to have already realized that a point of view was important to have - was due in large part to my Emory colleague Prof. Benn Konsynski. Benn had recruited me in 1993, successfully luring me to Atlanta from Boston, where I had recently finished my PhD and started on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. Shortly after my arrival at Emory, I witnessed Benn give an informal talk to some Emory alums, and it was a tour de force of prognostication: in his short slide deck (a copy of which I still have!), he concisely summarized the main impacts that he felt would be felt from the then-new Internet. And he nailed it. (Except for the nomenclature. He had coined “cyber-commerce,” which did not catch on.)

Over the next several years, I immersed myself in the emerging World Wide Web, and I did a lot of my own pondering and forecasting.

From that reflection and research, there was one conclusion that kept nagging at me. Troubling me, to be honest. And that is why I put together the particular talk that I eventually delivered in spring 1998.

I entitled this lecture, “Whither Humanity?” By pointing out to you today that this was a pun, I telegraph the central question that - eventually, after a lot of breezy setup - the talk honed in on. “What’s going to be the impact of IT on business?” is a much smaller question than the one that worried me (and, if I was effective, worried my audience) that night. Discussing the question, “What’s going to be the impact of IT on our civilization"?” was my more ambitious aim.

And now, exactly twenty-five years later, we find ourselves reading daily about new commercial applications of artificial intelligence (AI), persistent nuisances from automated “bots” on social media, increasing sophistication of “smart things” and connected environments. And, I hope, we start to find ourselves having some concerns about the extent to which our laws, regulations, business and employment practices, social contracts and societal norms are tracking the magnitude of what changes we’re in the middle of.

So what a fortuitous time it is to dust off my talk from 1998, which had some things to say about times like this, and see how well I did: What did I see back then that has come to pass? What didn’t happen? What significant happenings did I miss? Given that we all can draw on 25 years of new experience since then, what do we now believe is in store for the next 25?

Wrestling with the fate of humanity itself should be fun! Let’s make it so: I hope you’ll stay with this series as I lay out my original text with commentary, and as I invite the community to weigh in on their thoughts.

In my next post, I’ll publish the first part of that talk, with some commentary, and we’ll let the conversation begin! Please subscribe to my Substack, so you’ll be there when we start opening this time capsule.

Moving 5 hours up I-85 from Atlanta, where I'd lived and worked for 30 years (a full forty years, in the case of my wife!), has been an enormous undertaking. Many of you know the amount of work and stress and complexity of a move, and when that move starts with disassembling households that have been established for decades, literally, and in which children became teens became adults-who-need-guest-rooms… each dimension of those various costs scales up from those acumulated strata.

But early indications are that it will bring exactly what we were looking for. Atlanta was a fantastic run, and it remains a great city. But recall the parable of the frogs in the pots of boiling water: the one in which the temperate rose slowly but steadily might not realize it was time to jump out until he was almost cooked. Metro Atlanta grew (NET!) by 50- to as much as 100,000 people each year, every year since the 1960s. That’s how a small-ish city becomes a 6 million person sprawl. When we finally realized we were almost cooked - for example, noting how much time we would spend planning even basic activities around when or even whether the traffic would be bearable - we decided to make a bold leap.

We also were looking for a different kind of neighborhood than is common in Atlanta, and a different kind of house. We’re very active and mobile, but we intend to live long enough that we no longer are, and neither of us wants to live in the kind of places our late parents shuffled around in during their final years. Our house - that is, our final house, we hope - and its surroundings needed to be suitable for right now but also when we reach our 70s and 80s.

It was only a year ago when we started musing about life after Atlanta. Sure, we nosed around the city and found a few very pricey pockets of what we were starting to imagine for ourselves. But even then - to take advantage of what Atlanta offers would still involve having to negotiate its increasingly frustrating mobility options. So we started considering mid-sized cities in the region, and we settled on Greensboro.

And here we are, one circle around the sun later, already moved in!

I’ll share more about our newly adopted home city later, after we’ve had time to see more and learn more. But we came out of that boiling pot in a hurry, and we’ve wasted no time in getting to know and appreciate Greensboro. We’e already seen a baseball game (our minor league Greensboro Grasshoppers falling to the Greenville Drive in extra innings) and a wonderful concert (The Wailin’ Jennys at the beautifully restored Carolina Theater), and we haven’t had a bad meal yet! We find it impossible to sit on our front porch or take a walk in the neighborhood without getting engaged in conversations with neighbors. And even the barred owls have made sure we could hear their calls at night, lest we miss their kin who did the same outside our former home in Atlanta.

So, with desk space cleared and the computer up and running, those piles and stacks of ideas and projects and work are starting to call to me. I’d been waiting for this moment to start up my Substack. (Thank you for reading this far!) In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing a lot of things across what I hope will be an engaging and intriguing variety of topics and issues.

Please subscribe - free is fine, of course! - and follow along as I look backward, forward, sideways and upside down at culture, technology, politics and the state of the world.

This is Patrick’s Substack.

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