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communication

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Is the Net changing the way YOU think? Sure has, me.

I just read this article in the Atlantic about how the Net has changed the way the article’s author thinks. He’s wondering what the larger, societal effects will be. Being The Atlantic, he’s also savvy enough to realize there may be unintended good consequences that can’t be predicted, in addition to the negatives he highlights.

The article gave me pause. Upon reflection, I believe he’s right. Ten years ago, usability expert Jakob Neilson was doing studies that showed people skim online, they don’t read in depth. And it’s pretty clear from anyone who’s spent five minutes in a browser that we jump from topic to topic pretty quickly.

I know that my own writing has changed. I used to love writing longhand in a lined pad, and now can barely form a sentence without having a text editor where I can cut and paste. And as for reading? My tolerance for reading long non-fiction books went away years ago. I inch my way through them now. So do I absorb complicated new information that requires Thought and Contemplation? Er, not nearly as much. Maybe it’s simply that I’m older and busier, but it’s true that the Net has habituated me to sound-bite style reading.

That’s one big worry for my upcoming Get-it-Done Guy book, in fact. Part of the reason it is organized as many, many small micro-chapters is that I don’t believe anyone’s going to read a 200-page book straight through. And if I want to give readers value, it has to come in a form they can use.

How about you?

What if you had $1 billion to spend on a Presidential campaign?

I was reading reports that Michael Bloomberg was rumored to announce his candidacy for President. A friend mentioned that he had reportedly said he would spend up to $1 billion to get elected (no sources were cited).

I was thinking: what would you do if you were going to spend $1 bn on a Presidential campaign?

Rather than spend it on vapid attack ads, I might spend it revitalizing a community, or doing something to make a concrete difference in the lives of many people, and then saying, “That’s the kind of thing I want to see happen as President.”

Would it work? I don’t know. But I’d rather see the money directly creating good than going to yet another round of media buys so we can all be inundated with the meaningless drivel that is campaign advertising.

The world is what you make it; what are you making it?

Chris Matthews was just commenting that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was “a reminder of the dangerous world we all live in.”

In that moment, it struck me: we all live in a world of our own making. Oh, I don’t mean literally, though fans of The Secret may disagree. But our experience of the world is so deeply tied to our interpretations that what most of us call “truth” is nothing more than our own made up stories.

I look at the world today and see more than 6 billion people surviving. Many don’t have enough water or health care, but they’re surviving. It fact population continues to rise. That doesn’t sound like a dangerous world to me; that sounds like a world that’s provided us pretty much everything we need to thrive. Heck, we’ve even exterminated or controlled all of our natural predators.

To the extent we live in a “dangerous” world, that danger comes from other humans. For example, investment bankers and financial managers who deal in collateralized debt obligations. And yes, the occasional human being kills others. Sometimes it’s in war, or for political reasons, or whatever. And the media focuses on those events precisely because the violent, dangerous events are the exception, rather than the rule.

Most Americans have never suffered pain worse than a stubbed toe. We’re surrounded on the east and west by oceans so broad that no one can cross them without ample warning. We have Mexico and Canada to the south and north. The greatest danger there comes from having too much cheap labor and better ice hockey teams, respectively. As for the rest of the world, we have more intercontinental warheads than everyone else put together and then some.

In short, we’re the most dangerous thing in the world, and in the absolute scale of things, even we aren’t doing much damage. (Except unintentionally, to the environment, but that’s not what Chris Matthews was talking about.)

So Chris lives in a dangerous world because he finds the danger and then calls the world dangerous. He could also look at all the good things and call the world safe, secure, and happy. His choice.

And what is your choice? Which world do you live in?

If you want to bring this into a business context, since this is a business BLOG, let me ask you: when you look at your competition, your industry, and your trends, what stories do you tell? How do you explain the actions of others? The actions of markets? Do you tell a story of luck? Of skill? Of timing? Are you a victim of the market (“the failure of our initiative was because of a bad economy”) or are you a driver of the market (“we did everything we could think of and found the combination that let us become market leader in a mature market”)?

Examine your stories. They’re only stories, and they dictate your every perception, your every decision, and your every action. Choose your stories well.

Caught off-guard by the CEO? Try integrity. You might like it.

I was just reading a blog post on David Maister’s BLOG (David is one of the world’s experts on managing professional service firms) about a time he was caught off guard when a CEO publicly questioned his integrity. How should he have responded? What he did was to remain silent until the discussion continued. That tactic scares the bejeezez out of me.

He suggests that a consultant’s nonverbal response is essential and advocates practicing non-silence responses until they can be delivered smoothly. I disagree. Here’s what I wrote:

read more…

Wow. Does anyone really believe scripted friendship is sincere?

shudder I just called Crowne Hotels to make a hotel reservation. Then I called back to make a slight change. Both times, the account rep greeted me with a chipper, “What is your name so I may have the pleasure of serving you today?” While they sounded friendly, that script is awful. Am I supposed to believe that right out of the gate, they find the mere thought of serving me is pleasurable? If so, how’d Crowne Hotels do it? Can I take their trainer’s training, and turn people into Zombies for my business, next?

Actually they sound like fundamentally friendly people who have been given a really awful script to read. The script made me feel oddly … unclean. Like someone I was just meeting had been told to insinuate themselves beyond my boundaries so I would think well of them. Even really friendly people reading scripts sound like people reading scripts. And when a script says, “It’s my pleasure to serve you,” I don’t believe it for an instant. The subtext is, “I’m scared spitless I’m going to lose my job unless I read this godforsaken quote from a Harlequin Romance word-for-word.”

If you hire truly people-oriented people, let them go off-script. They’re people-oriented, they’ll figure out what to say. Believe me, we customers can tell the difference. And we appreciate it! It’s nice to have a real conversation with a real person who really cares about helping me out. At least, that’s why my script says I’m supposed to say here…

“Bomb hoax” hoax undermines our real emergency response ability

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Ok. I can’t keep quiet about this any longer. It’s driving me nuts. I just read a story titled $2 million US settlement in Boston TV ad bomb hoax. This is a fine example of how the wrong words can do damage, even when intending to inform.

“Bomb hoax” implies intent to deceive people into believing a bomb was present. People who engage in hoaxes (“perpetrators”) aren’t nice people. Just the phrase smears the characters of the men who placed the ads around Boston.

In a real bomb hoax, someone calls a building and says “There’s a bomb!” In this ad campaign, they put boxes with lighted cartoon characters around the city, where they stayed unmolested for a couple of weeks before being noticed. The same boxes in a dozen other cities produced only calm amusement. That doesn’t sound much like a bomb hoax.

A more accurate headline would be, “$2MM paid to Boston to compensate for ad mistaken for bomb.” Or, if you want the language to correctly specify who did what, “Turner pays $2MM to compensate for Boston Mayor and Police mistaking ad campaign for bomb.”

The Mayor, Governor, and emergency response people kept saying that “in a post-9/11 world, [Turner] should have known” that police and bomb units would mistake glowing cartoon characters for bombs. That’s absurd. In a post-9/11 world, police and bomb units should be well-trained to notice something wrong, investigate it, quickly identify what is and isn’t a threat, and only shut down the city if there’s danger.

I live in Boston. It took the city’s emergency response team a couple of weeks to discover brightly-lit ads that were designed to be noticed. Is this supposed to make me feel more secure? Once they noticed the ads, it took them hours to figure out the difference between a light-bright and a bomb. And in an oft-overlooked postscript, while investigating the cartoons, they found two real pipe-bomb hoaxes that they’d not have found if they weren’t looking for the Turner ads. Oh, boy. I feel like they’re really keeping me safe in a post-9/11 world. Not.

Our emergency response team screwed up, big-time. They’ve successfully shifted the blame using words like “hoax” and “perpetrator” so they needn’t take the responsibility for their slow response, their extraordinarily inept discovery of the real situation, and their missing the real hoax pipe bombs. Now, they’re showing the same lack of skill in identifying and fixing their contribution to the problem. All so they needn’t say “we screwed up.” I only hope they perform better if we ever have a real emergency.