Category: Uncategorized

Mind Camp 3.0 is this weekend, and I’m getting to know some of the participants through the planning process. One is Scott Berkun, whose eponymous blog contains an incisive analysis of bullshit. It starts with the history (beginning with Genesis, in which, Berkun points out “nearly everyone lied”) and then goes into the nitty gritty of how to combat BS. Very much worth reading if you deal with human beings on a regular basis. Not sure I could use the suggestions to stand up to God, though, if he told me the apples were fatal.

After reading this essay, I’m very much looking forward to meeting Scott. As a writer/editor, my fight against BS is usually conducted from the inside — for instance, someone has hired me to help them foist (wittingly or unwittingly) a certain amount of BS onto an audience. My job is to lower the BS quotient to the point that their communication won’t be perceived as BS and discounted or (worse) sprayed back at them. Amazingly, bullshitters never seem to perceive this is a risk; they never say “Gee, Karen, I know this sounds like, er, bullshit…is there any way to make it sound more credible?”

Think back on the day you got the greatest job, or contract, of your career. Chances are you sent in a resume, or wrote a proposal, that led to an interview, that led to the work. Not only did someone’s decision to hire you go on to change your life, it changed some other lives as well — those of the people who competed against you and didn’t get the gig.

Recently I had dinner with a friend who does some of the hiring for his office. He’d been interviewing candidates, all of them well qualified, and two of them had been quite out of the ordinary. After some deliberation, he’d decided on one, but was still wondering if he’d made the right choice. He described his interactions with them in some detail. One of them had come across very thoughtful and thorough, but a tad hesitant. The other had been decisive, but verging on brash. In fact, another interviewer had complained about her manners. My friend had decided on the more aggressive candidate, saying her style was a good match for their particular field of work.

But just before he had to report his decision to the company’s HR folks, my friend found himself having second thoughts. He sent the two finalists’ resumes, along with the resume of a third highly qualified applicant, to his boss to get his opinion.

His boss pointed out that the two preferred candidates both had resumes and cover letters with multiple typos and spelling errors. The third candidate’s written presentation was perfectly proofed. My friend and his boss discussed it, and agreed that because a major part of the job entails highly accurate and professional written communication with outside agencies, the candidate with the most professional writing and presentation skills would be the best one. They hired him.

A sobering story. I think I’ll be a little slower to hit the Send button for the next few days.

The science blog Cognitive Daily reports on research into why people remember pictures better than words — and how speaking the words aloud can change that dynamic.

A few days ago I received a check for my work on a project, which is not unusual. What made this check special was that it was marked “royalties.”

Royalties?

Royalities are fees paid to a license holder of intellectual property for its use. For instance, when you buy a book, you make a payment that goes to the publisher, who (depending on the arrangement with the writer) shares or dispenses royalties to the writer or writers. The “royal” connection is historical: Rights to sell minerals were once granted by kings or queens to individuals or companies.

Royalities have become extremely complicated; they are dispensed based on complex agreeements, contracts, and licenses. An artist can sell his or her rights to intellectual property, and can also leave such rights to someone else via a will. Author Neil Gaiman worked with an attorney to develop a boilerplate will for authors’ literary estates and has made it available to fellow writers as a free download.

My concern about a creating a special will for a literary estate would be how it would fit with an existing will covering an author’s tangible property. But, as Gaiman points out, it’s much better to have something on record than to leave people guessing.

I hope I’ll get to worry about this some day!

If I feel myself getting too serious about the importance of writing, I’ll watch Copy Goes Here, a short film by the Chicago design firm Coudal Partners.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) started promptly over here last night as I devoted my most productive work hours (1o p.m. to midnight) to hammering away at The Grave View (the working title of my New England mystery).

Meanwhile, a previous NaNoWriMo participant and some friends have launched GloRoMo, Global Rope Month. They will track (and reward) participants’ efforts to tie 50,000 feet of rope during the month of November. (By “tying rope,” they mean rope with people in it, as in bondage.) The organizers estimate a successful GloRoMo will involve tying and suspending eight people a day.

Perhaps there is room for a collaboration here? I’m sure by the last week of November some of the frenzied writers will be looking for rope, or perhaps for a good excuse — like “I was helping a friend and got sort of…tied up.”

Precious few.

Today, journalists write books, then they market them, and they become self-interested business people. They blog, and they become self-promoters on behalf of their blogs.

This is not their fault, either. The protective wall that (some) publishers (sometimes) have built to protect journalistic integrity within traditional publications turns out to have been much an illusion. And, as a former journalist, I can say that it was selectively rotted in some places all along, with calls to kill, slant, or emphasize coverage coming from the publisher’s office, usually after a call from one of his or her country club cronies.

Consider this: The traditional news media has traditionally squelched its own reporters’ attempts to cover news unpleasant to big advertisers (from the rise of the Internet, to global warming, to food contamination caused by agribusiness practices) for as long as possible.

Why am I ranting about this?

Jim Benson (J. LeRoy’s Evolving Web) is one of several pundits making a fuss about TechCrunch, a site founder Michael Arrington frankly describes as “different.” Arrington goes on to say:

TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.”

So, what Arrington is running is essentially a self-published gossip column.

Jim asserts:

Michael Arrington is a commentator. He is not a journalist. As a commentator, he can write about what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants.

Michael Arrington is my favorite kool-aide drinker. I wouldn’t trade him for a box of Steve Jobses. But he is biased, he does answer to what is foremost on his plate, and he blogs accordingly. When I say biased, I don’t mean he lies or distorts – but I do mean that he has a definite focus and that focus impacts what he writes.

Is this really an issue? What Jim is saying about Arrington could be said about just about everyone these days, with the exception of a few hundred investigative reporters, most of them working outside of the US. And Arrington is not doing anything special, except, I guess, trying turn VC gossip into a brand and convince us that he can somehow continue to deliver valuable info to us without pissing off his friends. Which he probably can, if he’s careful.

I guess the issue is that even journalists are not journalists any more. Everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Send it out for political/chemical analysis, and you’ll probably find out your latte is spiked.

On the occasion of Nevada Day, Geoff Duncan’s Percolating blog pays tribute to his 6th and 7th grade teacher, Mr. Gandalfo, who made state history unforgettable:

He once marched a class of us through seven feet of snow into a meadow in the Sierras; when we got to the middle, he stopped, turned, and said to the exhausted kids, “So that wasn’t easy, was it? When the Donner Party was in this field, the snow was twenty-two feet high. Think about that.” I still do, Mr. G.

This brought back fond memories of Mr. Kitchen, who taught American History at my high school in Northern Virginia. Mr. Kitchen focused so intently on the positive, and the interesting, that even the slackers got caught up in his lectures and disrupters realized they were being ignored (or glared at by the other students). One year Mr. Kitchen got stuck team-teaching with one of the most difficult and unpopular teachers in the school, and never once indicated that he was in any way unhappy about it — something that, in retrospect, I find amazing.

I came away with a fairly decent understanding of American history, and an appreciation for the amount of effort and talent that goes into great teaching. There were no hikes through seven-foot snowdrifts in Northern Virginia, but Mr. Kitchen did show us a highly effective technique for digging yourself out when things got deep. It involved a hieroglyph that looked like a small shovel. He drew it in margin of a student paper wherever he detected a pile of …bullshit.

You don’t often see an established novelist running for political office, and Kinky Friedman’s independent run for the Texas governorship does much to illustrate why.

Texas-born Friedman, a noted crime fiction writer and a notorious country music entertainer, threw his signature big black hat into the ring and has been busy turning the the four-way gubernatorial race into a three-ring circus. While no one has yet fled the state or pulled a gun (typical activities for Texas politicians) “the Kinkster” has apparently managed to annoy Republicans, Democrats, Hispanics, and black voters, coming across as more of a libertarian than a liberal. If he represents any political party these days, it would be the “Incorrect” one.

What on earth could he be thinking?

Living in New York in 1980, I crossed paths with Friedman once or twice at the Lone Star Cafe, a loud, flamboyant waterhole for Texans who’d somehow found themselves living in Manhattan. Just north of Greenwich Village, the Lone Star was where folks like Willie Nelson and Delbert McClinton played when they were in town, and where Texas liberals like Jim Hightower staged fundraisers. In those days, the Kinkster and his band The Texas Jewboys were the entertainment.

In the 1990s, I encountered Friedman in his subsequent incarnation as a fabulously inventive mystery writer whose fictitious detective was also…Kinky Friedman. (This review I wrote for January Magazine attempted to explain the complex Friedman/Friedman relationship that pervades the novels.)

Friedman eventually shifted the book series, and his own headquarters, from New York back to Texas, where he’s continued to stir things up. Perhaps a run for governor was a logical next step for a pundit who spoofed the Dixie Chicks’ nude Entertainment Weekly photo spread by appearing nude — in triplicate — on the cover of the Dallas Observer.

While Friedman (the politician) is sagging embarrassingly in the polls as election day nears, it’s quite possible that Friedman (the writer) is going come out of this a big winner: I mean, look at the material he’s got for his next novel.

That’s the name of the new book by Stanford engineering professor Robert Sutton. Guy Kawasaki blogs about it today, describing Sutton’s “Starbucks Test” for spotting jerks:

It goes like this: If you hear someone at Starbucks order a “decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n’-Low and one NutraSweet,” you’re in the presence of an asshole. It’s unlikely that this petty combination is necessary — the person ordering is trying to flex her power because she’s an asshole.

Security expert Gavin De Becker dispenses similar — if considerably less lighthearted — advice in his book Gift of Fear: Survival Signs that Protect Us from Violence.

Whether you’re listening to an engineer or a security consultant talk about those who creep us out, you’ll notice a recurring theme: Jerks are not hard to spot. In fact, they’re glaringly obvious. The twist is that we are socially conditioned to “make nice.” We either ignore assholes (the typical male response) or somehow think we are being “overly sensitive” about their jerkiness (a typical female reaction).

Creeps in the workplace are bad news for your career; if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, it’s even worse. One creep client, partner, or subcontractor is enough to sink your whole business — even take your personal life down the drain as well. (De Becker has a sobering story of a travel agency owner and his employee-from-hell.)

So…if someone you’ve recently met, or are considering doing business with, makes you feel sick to your stomach, or sets the hairs on your neck on end, there’s a reason. Chances are that he or she is on a course to violate your project, your bank account, your sanity, or you.

While Sutton’s book considers a range of assholes (from the harmless to the dangerous) and proposes a range of ways to deal with them, I have to admit I favor the De Becker approach to dealing with them: Don’t apologize, don’t explain, don’t engage, and don’t fight. Just….leave. De Becker believes that many creeps and jerks are encouraged by engagement — even what you or I would think of as a very unpleasant, negative response somehow energizes them.

Life is too short to spend it dealing with assholes. Unfortunately, a poll on Kawasaki’s blog found that 45 percent of his readers report that they work for bosses who are assholes.