Damn! Missed My Own Deadline.

Doesn’t speak well for someone who advertises “writes to size, listens to criticism, and delivers to deadline and budget.”

I’d arbitrarily picked Sundays for posting and was doing pretty well until this week. However, there’s no excuse for missing a deadline, and if I were writing this for some editor I’d be prepared to take a loss of some kind, maybe even of employment.

But it’s not being done for a client, it's just for me, so anyone who keeps reading is going to get an explanation that’s going to sound a lot like an excuse.

My cat has diabetes.

How could that be an excuse for missing a deadline? Watch me.

Squiggles has been put on a restricted (and expensive) diet, under which regimen he can eat only twice a day. This is a dramatic contrast to his previous mealtime accommodations, which ran to all-day availability of dry food supplemented by handouts of treats any time Jean or I had occasion to walk into the kitchen. 

Walk into the kitchen any hour of the day or night, and there he’d be, sitting quietly in his “begging spot,” not saying anything but giving you that look they show you in the children’s charity appeals on TV. The goodies, named “Temptations,” must be 90 proof catnip because he would just vacuum them up.

Well, that’s all over now. He gets prescription dry food once in the morning and once at night, and he gets insulin shots as well. Think about it. Deprived of your favorite food, and some guy sticks a needle in through your fur twice a day.   

Squiggles is feeling bad and has taken to sunbathing under the lamp on my desk. This interferes with my use of the keyboard and my view of the computer screen, and that’s why I couldn’t post anything yesterday.  

Personhood

The other “personhood,” courtesy of SCOTUS, Citizens United decision, January 2010.

Now that corporations are effectively “persons” with the rights and appurtenances thereunto appertaining, or the important ones, anyway --  are they also going to be subject to the things that afflict the rest of us?

Citibank, for just one example, presumably a male organization judging from its most visible executives, is a tad over 200 years old.  There’s a TV commercial that says in more than half of all males over age 50 the prostate gland, which starts out the size of a walnut, will have grown to the size of a lemon by age 70 or 80. Citi’s prostate problem should be something fierce. (How big would Mellon Bank’s problem be?) Betty Crocker has to be menopausal by now. No wonder our biggest corporations get cranky sometimes.  Catch Sara Lee on the wrong day and you could get a pie in the face.

Luckily, these persons will now presumably be eligible for Obamacare. Pre-existing conditions (indictments, fines, penalties) can be waived now. They could register in the federal system and all the states they live in; with some dedicated lawyering they could probably qualify for subsidies. Headquartered in another country? Awkward, but what’s Congress for? They’ll make it legal. If the country isn’t too big, the corporation can annex it.   

Some of these outfits are that big and have tons of money, but the Supreme Court says their spending millions to influence elections is just an extension of the long-standing One Man/One Vote principle: One Corporation/One Election. Seems fair.

But if for all practical purposes they’re going to have the vote like us, give `em all the rest of it -- standing on line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, wiping the chins of their elderly retirees, really paying taxes...

You wanna be a person, GM? It all comes with the territory. 

The Missing Ingredient

There’s a program that shows up on my local TV periodically, “Things That Aren’t Here Any More,” “here“  being Los Angeles. It’s narrated by a reporter popular in the area for many years, Ralph Story (who, sadly, isn’t here any more either). 

His things were really “things” -- old landmark buildings, restaurants, street cars, historic hot dog stands. His era (and mine) came before some other, un-material but maybe more important things faded out. “Shame” comes to mind

My old dictionary calls shame a disturbed or painful feeling of guilt or blameworthiness. It used to have a powerful preventive effect on would-be evildoers, and a corrective effect on wrongdoers, but that doesn’t happen any more. The politician caught taking bribes, the CEO found embezzling money from his hedge fund -- back in the day, the perpetrator would go to ground (and eventually prison) and his family would sneak out of town on the midnight milk train. Not that they were also guilty, but because they were ashamed.  There’s still a society or two here or there where the guy with the big office and the biggest paycheck will step down even if someone else has caused the company to be at fault. If he’s really serious he’ll commit suicide.

But this is an age and a society where you can settle a legal case with every evidence of being guilty but still not admit guilt.  If you’re an officer of a corporation, you’re just about immune. Maybe a fine will be imposed on the corporation (at worst) but the stockholders will pay that. The guy at the top who caused the whole problem may just as easily get a bonus, go on the TV talk shows, and author a book.  The crooked politician may run for office while under indictment, and stage a political comeback when he gets out of the slammer. The missing ingredient is shame.

Earlier generations took a sterner view. Putting the offender on display with his head and hands protruding from the stocks would almost certainly have diverted some observers’ dark impulses into more socially acceptable channels. The guy on display also got to think at leisure about what it was that put him there and decide whether it was a good idea and worth doing again. You’ll still read about someone being pilloried -- but it’s a figure of speech today.  Bring  back the real thing? You could argue it. Is the pillory crafters’ guild still around?

 Keep in mind, it was probably uncomfortable as hell, but the primary objective wasn’t to inflict physical pain; it was shaming. You were set out in the public square for all your neighbors to see and think about what you’d done.

We’d have to re-educate a large segment of the public about what shame is, but I’d be for it. Some time in the stocks could adjust the attitude of even a celebrity CEO or a securely gerrymandered incumbent congressperson. Might even humble an errant Influencer or Thought Leader.The Missing Ingredient

Beginnings

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my packrat tendencies, and this time I have the ultimate example.

In an old file I’ve found the handwritten composition I wrote for a highschool English class in 1949. For me this is akin to an archeologist discovering the papyrus that will later define a whole civilization.

OK, that’s a bit much; but it was the start of something.  It’s titled “The Science of Listening,” and I remember very distinctly it was a response to the activity of another guy in English 7-5 who, it seemed to me, never stopped talking. Worse, the technique was working for him. Dr. Mercier seemed to be taken in, responding to Peter's eager volunteering to read his work in class and awarding him high grades.

This paper, as you’ll see below, was my scathing riposte. Sixty years before the invention of snark!

The Science of Listening

      “Hearing, while one of the most valuable natural gifts we possess, is also one of the most underrated. It is our greatest aid to learning, our strongest tie with the world around us, for what we cannot see, we may hear of, and hearing of it we may picture it in our minds.
      “But we have not yet reached the crux of the matter, for hearing is not listening. Hearing is a natural endowment. Listening is an acquired virtue, and a science in itself. Hearing is the curse of knowing noise. Listening is the power of concentrating sound and arriving at a single product.

      “It is a curious fact that man has not the power to talk and listen at the same time. The need therefor becomes felt for a medium of transmission, a switchboard through which the tangled lines of articulation and absorption may be sorted out. This need was filled by the invention of silence, the discovery of one of the unsung benefactors of humanity. 
      "Like every great soul he was ridiculed and humiliated. 'Silence will never work!' they said. 'You’re not taking an interest in the world if you don’t make noises with your mouth.' There were even those who believed that the way to get an education was to keep their mouths open rather than their ears. So they ridiculed the great man, as to this day his disciples are reviled.

      “But we digress. With the coming of silence, listening came into its own. Man found that by remaining quiet himself he was better able to concentrate on the sounds others were making. Through further development and practice he found himself able to distinguish the pertinent facts from the rest of the sounds. In this way he greatly facilitated his education.

      “However, listening has not yet been fully accepted for what it is worth. Rather, since it is accompanied by silence, it is sometimes taken as the mark of the disinterested or unintelligent. It still has a long hard climb ahead before it reaches universal acceptance, and until it does, listening must remain a lost art rather than a science.“

A little confusion there at the end between art and science, but you get the idea.

There was just one problem: I was too modest -- or insecure -- to volunteer to read it aloud in class. No one has ever seen or heard it until now.  

When I Edited Engineers - 1

I used to work in aerospace, editing proposals to the government. Because the proposals had technical content, it seemed logical to management to have engineers write them. The result often was that the quality of the technical stuff was excellent, but the non-technical stuff surrounding it, of which there’s quite a bit, didn’t work as well. 

Language would be stilted, and there would usually be too much of it. “Summaries” and “overviews” would choke with detail; and while, thankfully, graphics weren’t my responsibility, I did have to wrestle with paragraph-length figure captions. I also suspected there were office pools for Most Acronyms In A Single Sentence.

Time and temperament permitting, I would collaborate with the subject matter experts to rewrite or sometimes write the material. Other times, left to their own devices, the SMEs would fall into certain patterns in their writing; certain words would be used, or misused, in the same way. It was my responsibility to correct this, but since prevention is preferable to cure, I wrote up generic corrections to some of the more common problems and made them available to each new proposal team. It had no visible effect, but I present them in an occasional series here pro bono for any engineers who may happen by.

When I Edited Engineers  - 1

On “Over” Use

Many people have developed the habit of prefacing numbers with the word “over.” It seems to have become almost an involuntary thing. Even engineers who may deal in precision out to four decimal places in their everyday work become susceptible to it when working a proposal.

Aside from the fact that it would make more sense to say “more than,” it’s a tricky thing, and you don’t want to use it indiscriminately.  It’s one thing to say “over a million,” but something else to say “over 27.” You won’t be asked for more precision if you’re a journal claiming your million-plus readership, but if you’re talking about testing an airplane, you want to avoid saying “over 27 successful flights.” If you didn’t make it all the way to 28 -- 27^1/₂  is bad news. 

I think there’s a reason why people use “over” more than “more than.” “More than” makes you conscious of the question “How many more?” and that might require some effort or research to get the answer (plus which you might find that “more than” was just an expression and there were only 27 after all).

More Views on LinkedIn (on More Views on LinkedIn)

The next “thud” you hear coming from this quarter may be LinkedIn hitting bottom on my value scale. 

I’ll acknowledge my own contribution to that; I allowed myself to get into discussions (arguments, really) that had nothing to do with business, and were on subjects and with people so polarized  there was never any chance discussion would change a mind on either side. Engaging in that is, I’ll say it myself, stupid. 

Now, however,  I’ve seen something  that may tell us more of what LinkedIn is really about. 

People publish tips for success on LinkedIn, success being defined most often as getting more people to view your profile. Presumably the more people who look you up, the more chances you will have to succeed in whatever it is you’re doing, usually selling something. For some people, of course, being noticed is the goal in itself.

But of three tips I saw recently, only one involved anything constructive, like posting information of value. The real keys to succeeding on Linked in appear to be (a) to keep changing things in your profile (doesn’t matter what) because people connected to you receive notice of those changes and, you hope, will want to see what’s changed, upping your number of profile views; and   (b) to look at lots of other people’s profiles, on the assumption that they will then look at yours  -- upping your number of profile views -- to see why you’re checking on them. This one has the added benefit of also increasing the number of views for all those people you’ve looked at -- a win-win situation if I’ve ever seen one. The beauty of it is, it doesn’t require any intellectual effort. Your fingers do the walking.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like what I remember as the reason for joining. I’d be happy to debate the subject with anyone who cares to defend those techniques.

I’ve also posted to a “LinkedIn Influencer,” the question “What qualifies you to be an “Influencer”? The occasion was my attention being called, via email announcement, to something he had written. It was well enough written, and presented nothing to offend, but Influential, with a capital “I”? Didn’t seem that way. It sure didn’t have the heft of the Communist Manifesto, or Martin Luther’s checklist, or something written by the Thomases  Paine or Jefferson. Fact is, it didn’t rise to the level of a political speech by Mitch McConnell -- a very low bar.

But then, there are people easily influenced (take a look at the post just before this one, December 7, for an example). For me, though, old and set in my ways, a banal essay about  happiness, money, and success isn't going to influence anything.

All in all, LinkedIn is a disappointment. If that puts me on the short end of a 300-million-against-one argument -- so be it.

"Thought Leaders"

I’ve made fun of LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” before, but I’m wondering now if maybe it’s indicative of a serious condition.

I recently ran across a LinkedIn post (it was actually months old when I discovered it) but it intrigued me to the point that I started looking back at some of the 7500 comments it generated.

The subject was why the author doesn’t accept “connections” to his network. If you don’t know LinkedIn, LinkedIn encourages people to connect with other people to expand their business networks, and provides a mechanism for doing that with one click of a mouse. You could say “connecting” is the definition of what LinkedIn is.

The gist of the article was that the author was selective about whose requests for connection he accepted. People do abuse the system and many requests for connection are really attempts to sell you something.  

That said -- the article adopted the most arrogant tone imaginable, the author in effect laying out a list of reasons why most people aren’t good enough to associate with him. I reserve judgement on whether he’s just tone deaf (some people don’t realize how they sound in writing) or if he’s really as arrogant as his writing says he is.

The real point of my writing about this, though, is the reaction from people who read it. It generated  7500 comments, and almost every one said the article was terrific. The mind boggles. One of his criteria for refusing a connection was lack of a photo on the applicant’s profile page. “You aren’t a real person if you haven’t posted a photo.” Yet dozens of people with no photo on their profile page congratulated him on the article. Come on, folks; recognize when you’re being insulted.

The fact is, the article is insulting to everyone. If you want to connect with him, for whatever reason, if you don’t meet his stringent specs, don’t bother to apply. Bad enough from someone who is apparently a successful businessman; but here are aspiring entrepreneurs and wannabe tycoons saying “Great article. I’m adopting your guidelines.” Most would be prohibited from accepting themselves as connections under those rules 

I know there are 200 or 300 million people on LinkedIn and you can’t draw generalities from a few or even a few thousand, but I can’t help wondering: “Are this many people really this willing -- even eager -- to be led?” Why would you adopt policies that work for someone you don’t know, operating in a particular situation bound to be different from yours?  Wouldn’t it be better to develop your own guidelines, even if that means making a mistake or two along the way?  

The whole idea behind being on LinkedIn is to meet new people. If you turn away, or away from, everyone who doesn’t post a picture or lay out all the details of his or her life or who hits a typo in a message, you don’t know who you might be missing.     It could be me.  
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RPH