Star Beginnings

A flash-back moment: Old commercials featuring people who later became stars.

Among others, it includes John Travolta singing about Safeguard soap, Tom Selleck as the Chaz cowboy, and well, Keanu Reeves has a thing for corn flakes.

Diversity Fatigue?

Po Bronson wonders if Americans are suffering from "diversity fatigue."

I think many of the reactions are more against the hectoring zealots who have become associated with diversity and who tend to paint any opposition as racist, sexist, etc.

Summer Reading

Fortune magazine has assembled a list of summer reading.

Unlike most summer reading lists, this one is eclectic enough to be interesting.

There may be a Father's Day gift or two lurking there.

We're Watching You

The Ubisense Employee Tracker permits employers to track the whereabouts of employees and then note the locations on screens.

That should build trust.

The Problem with Labels

One of the truly harmful, and understandable, practices in life and the workplace is labeling. We label people and things in order to simplify matters and to close off further thought.

You may be given a good label, such as “Marie is a creative person” or “Tom is a solid performer,” as the result of one memorable moment of effectiveness that was witnessed by or brought to the attention of influential people. I’ve known some executives and managers who have coasted for years on a single incident even though their effective performance was a fluke. Like some celebrities who are famous for being famous, these individuals enjoy a good reputation which is based, after a while, on having a good reputation.

Conversely, you will see people who’ve been given negative labels. They are the designated whiners and eccentrics who are permitted to remain employed but only in a parallel universe. Their chances of rehabilitation are usually remote and the odds of promotion are nil.

Aside from the questionable ethics of such caste systems, there is another problem: Sometimes, the whiner is correct. Occasionally, the eccentric is brilliant. But if the labeling is in full force, management can miss those moments.

Ask yourself how often your views of people have been shaped by positive and negative labels and then consider whether the label is accurate based on your own experience with the person. You may discover that the image doesn’t match the reality, either for good or for bad.

40 Million?

Robert J. Samuelson, one of the most interesting writers on the immigration issue, examines the Senate bill and press coverage. An excerpt:

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

The Not So Beautiful People

Quick!

Which will hurt a film's chances at the Cannes Film Festival:

Being anti-American or pro-American?

Ah, you already knew the answer.

Lighten Up

At last, solid proof of global warming.

Fooling Smart People

A skeptical – and accurate – view of the fog that clouds many a workplace:

I’ve been to quite a few consultancy presentations where all kinds of jargon and graphs are flashed up on the screen. The consultants will drop terms like “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” into the presentation while showing some baffling data on the screen. If I look around the room while this is going on, everyone will be nodding and wide-eyed. The audience is baffled by the cool-sounding words and the clever-looking graphs.If, at this time, you ask the consultant what exactly an “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” is, they’ll often try to fob-you off with even more meaningless jargon. If you persist in trying to pin them down, they’ll start acting like you must be some kind of incompetent idiot for not understanding this stuff. And the audience will probably be on the consultant's side - they don't want to be seen as incompetent idiots.

Consultants behave this way because they know that’s how to get a sale. Bombard people with clever-sounding stuff they don’t really understand, and they’ll assume that you’re some kind of genius. It's a great way of making money.

[HT: Business Pundit ]

Presentation Ceremony

A minor public speaking tip: If you are going to make a presentation of an award, know the award.

Click here for the brief video.

Rube Goldberg

I referred to a "Rube Goldberg device" the other day during a workshop and some of the younger class members looked at me as if I'd started speaking in tongues.

For the uninitiated, this is a Rube Goldberg device.

Quote of the Day

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

- George Orwell

Nitwit Update

Who says that otherwise smart people can't do really stupid things?

The Home Depot annual meeting turned out to be a demonstration of arrogance.

Read the reviews here and here and here.

Fashion Blindness

One look at this photo will confirm the fact that there was a collective loss of taste in the Seventies.

How could that be? People could still see movies from the Twenties, when men and women knew how to dress with style.

Did the fashion designers shield their eyes? Was it a weird attempt to combine the styles of the Fifties and the Sixties to produce some Hybrid Fashion Demon from Hell?

If so, they succeeded.

Choices and Impulse Buying

New research is challenging the assumptions about impulse buying.

For example, the longer you shop, the less likely you are to make an impulse purchase.

[Translation: Set aside a couple of hours the next time you go to the store for milk.]

"Actually collects and stores heat"

James Lileks ponders a 1956 Ford Country Sedan:

The thing itself, however, is a reminder of the Old Days: while the engine will take you into the troposphere in four seconds, it lacks power steering and air conditioning, which means that driving is work on a 98 degree day. The seats are made of a material that actually collects and stores heat, it seems, and the steering wheel itself can take the flesh off your hands if you don’t park it in the shade.

Isotta-Fraschini

Forget the Porsche.

Lose the BMW.

I want a Isotta-Fraschini.

Updike Talks

John Updike talks about his upcoming novel, Terrorist, in an interview with TIME.

[I was amused by the question about whether Updike can write about an Arab American. The presumption is that you have to be a member of the group to write about a person who is a member of the group. It's nice that Tony Hillerman and a huge number of other writers never embraced that notion.]

Flunking "Myself 101"

Adrian Savage has hit another home run with his essay on common mistakes in self-development.

I've made every one. Please don't ask me how many times.

Puff Puff

Christine Sismondo takes on the precautionary principle, already a popular concept in helmeted, strapped-in, and cushioned North America, which is now being rocketed to a new extreme in Toronto.

No smoking outdoors?

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]

Ask Me Anything!

This CareerJournal article has some solid advice on how to handle any job interview question.

The formula is Q = A + 1

Off the Fat of the Land

Here's a Pepperdine University article on how the marketplace has responded to reports on obesity.

Think Subway.

What Goes Around...

Group dynamics in the Tour de France. An excerpt:

It was a sultry day in 1978, and the Tour's 100 racers were grinding through a 130-mile stage from Bordeaux to Biarritz. Most of the competitors were riding together in the peloton, the picturesque mob of competing teams that glides in formation across the French countryside every July.

With little warning, but as sometimes happens during long stages, somebody called for a bathroom break. Many riders from the race's ten different squads pulled to the side of the road and hopped off their bikes to relieve themselves. Those who didn't stop slowed down.
But instead of extending that customary courtesy, French rider Dante Coccolo decided to attack. His goal: sprint while others were taking their respective breaks, thereby putting a large time gap between himself and the group. Perhaps he'd even snatch one of bike racing's most prestigious prizes, a Tour stage win.

But Coccolo's gambit backfired: He had breached peloton etiquette. Again.

Read the rest here. Justice is done.

Hubris Update

A simple truth: Go on the witness stand, act like a controlling person, and people will find it difficult to believe that you didn't know what was going on.

More Enron analysis here.

Silence

I came in to the office before 6:30 this morning in order to work in silence.

Don't get me wrong. I have great co-workers and I enjoy talking with them. The greater benefit of silence dwells in my own silence. There is something very calming about not speaking for a sizable portion of time. That's one reason why Gandhi's practice of dedicating part of a day to silence did not mean that his staff couldn't talk to him - they could - but that he would not speak.

I suspect that most people, in this world of hubbub and demands, know what I'm saying. I have a stack of papers to handle this morning. I'll sip some coffee and work through them...without saying a single word.

Take your small pleasures where you can find them.

25 Worst Tech Products

PC World has released its list of the 25 worst tech products of all time.

And AOL came in first.

[HT: news.com ]

Quote of the Day

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

- Socrates

Leadership Physical

Random Thoughts from a CTO offers some very good questions for your "leadership physical."

Honk Not

Some t-shirts demand to be read and considered.

The Invisible Hand?

Larry Kudlow looks at the behavior of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and asks, “Would Adam Smith approve?”

Indeed, ownership is a self-help virtue, and it is held in much higher cultural esteem than the vice of government-dependant welfarism. This investor culture has at its core the very same ethical foundation that Adam Smith wrote about in 1759. This includes the rule of law that was so badly violated by Lay and Skilling, along with some other rotten apples like Tyco’s Dennis Koszlowski, Worldcom’s Bernard Ebbers, and Adelphia’s John Rigas.

Planet of the Apes?

Why are there so many corporate scandals?

Political scientist Barbara Kellerman suggests that the culprit may be our inner ape.

Hitchens

"Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in midconflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.

Christopher Hitchens on Memorial Day.

For Those We Remember

"I'm afraid I'm a practical man," said the doctor with gruff humor, "and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy." "You'll never be a practical man till you do," said Father Brown.

- G.K. Chesterton

It's Memorial Day in the United States. For many, it has as much meaning as a National Barbeque Day or a National Day at the Beach. For millions more, however, it is a reminder of the great, intangible, qualities that make a person, a community, and a nation.

The extent to which one believes in such qualities is the point at which nations divide. For many years, we have had influential people who scoff at patriotism and who view the world in economic terms. You've heard them: "All wars and foreign policy commitments are fought and made because of money." "The people who go into the military do so only because they cannot find a job elsewhere." "Whenever someone says 'It's not the money, it's the principle,' then you know that it's the money."

Oddly enough, many of the individuals with those opinions claim to disdain materialism and yet theirs is the most materialistic viewpoint of all. They miss the power of the intangible love for freedom that causes people to act against their material interests. George F. Kennan wrote years ago about the moralistic aspects of American foreign policy that separate it from policies driven solely by power politics. He was not saying that Americans are immune from such temptations, but that there is another element to most American policies; an element that can confuse observers who believe that all nations operate from selfish interests.

The people we remember today were part of that great intangible love for freedom. They did not bleed and die for a ledger sheet. And the Americans, Britons, Australians, Poles, and others who are in the front lines are the living representatives of those who knew the something that "practical" men and women have forgotten.

Carnival Up!

The Carnival of the Capitalists is being hosted this week by the Working Solo blog in Australia.

Click here for a great selection of articles on management and business.

Disability Legal Studies

You can now get a certificate in Disability Legal Studies at the University of Pittsburgh College of Law.

Ward Churchill Report

Here is the report of the investigative committee on the allegations of academic misconduct directed at Professor Ward Churchill.

[HT: Noodle Food blog ]

Quote of the Day

Q. Can you tell me how a battle works?

A. Well, in my opinion a battle never works; it never works according to plan.... The plan is only a common base for changes. It's very important that everyone should know the plan, so you can change easily. But the modern battle is very fluid, and you have to make your decisions very fast - and mostly not according to plan.

Q. But at least everybody knows where you're coming from?

A. And where you're going to, more or less.

- General Dan Laner, Israeli Defense Forces commander, Golan Heights, 1973

A Learned Skeptic

I confess that I have not read Jeffrey Pfeffer’s new book but it is nearing "The Read Zone."

An excerpt from an interview with Pfeffer:

You make a case for running a lot of little experiments. You give examples of a few internet companies doing it, which is easy at some level, because of all the metrics they can run. But I think some people think, "God, run experiments in my company? I didn't do so well in science in high school. Scientific method is beyond me." Do you think there's any possibility that that's what prevents people from really looking at evidence for why they're doing something?

JP: I think it could be one reason. But I also think there's a tendency in companies to believe that if it's worth doing, we ought to do it for everybody everywhere, all the time, and roll it out in a big Program with a capital "P." The mentality is, "If we're not convinced it's going to work, we might as well not do it anywhere." So you can see in these companies the endless debate, "Should we do A, or should we do B, or should we do C?" When the obvious thing to do is try A, B, and C in different places or at different times, and see which one works best.

Think about it, if medicine was practiced this way, you'd have people sitting around, having endless debates about whether some drug in theory ought to work or not, as opposed to doing trials. Look at the way airplanes are designed. You obviously start with theory and evidence about physics and engineering, but you also design, you build prototypes, or you now build prototypes on the computer. You put them through various exercises and you try different things. This is how architects now design buildings.

Sneeze and Wheeze Cities

It's a windy day in Phoenix. It looked like a dust storm to the south of town. All sorts of pollen will be kicked up but at least we aren't on the Forbes list of the top 10 cities for allergies:

1. Hartford, Connecticut
2. Greenville, South Carolina
3. Boston, Massachusetts
4. Detroit, Michigan
5. Orlando, Florida
6. Knoxville, Tennessee
7. Omaha, Nebraska
8. Sacramento, California
9. Washington, DC
10. Baltimore, Maryland

Who Makes the Laptops?

Is this the dirty little secret of the laptop computer industry?

[HT: www.reddit.com ]

The Violent Years

A preview of a movie from the Fifties, that wild time when the streets were ruled by violent girl gangs.

The Violent Years has everything you'd expect from a movie written by Ed Wood Jr. -- stilted dialog, tight sweaters, bad staging, tight sweaters, obvious moralizing, poor acting, and tight sweaters.

The actors look 10 years older then the characters they are playing, especially in the Girl Gang Terrorists sequence of the trailer, where it looks like a bunch of angry PTA moms tearing up classroom.

Hiring Consultants

I like this list of tips to consider when hiring a consultant and would add a few more:

• Be sensitive to possible pockets of resistance to the consultant. It is not unusual to find that the group that needs the consultant's help the most will be one of those pockets.
• Be prepared to shield the consultant from office politics.
• Watch out for "mission creep" in which additional work is unfairly packed into the scope of the original proposal.

Info Overload Avoidance

I'm going through a large of stack of newspapers from the past two weeks. Some I've already scanned and others were set aside with the intent of returning to an article.

Although it appears to be otherwise, this is actually an information overload avoidance exercise.

Why? Because I've found that a large chunk of the stories that are breathlessly promoted by the newspapers don't require daily attention. They are like soap operas - "Is Meredith still in the hospital?" - and can be picked up at various points without any real loss.

The New York Times has its moments and is still capable of great articles, but editorially it has become the joke that conservative critics used to crack back in the Sixties (Under an ad declaring, "I got my job through The New York Times," one wag wrote, "So did Castro.") and you see more of its editorial bias in the news articles. The Wall Street Journal has a liberal news staff and a conservative editorial one, which makes for a nice combination.

The same can be said of magazines. The news magazines have seriously declined in quality. TIME and Newsweek are now both shallow and biased; they'd be better advised to pick one or the other. The business mags are better. I regularly read Forbes, Business Week, Inc., Fortune, Business 2.0, Fast Company, and the Harvard Business Review as well as some more specialized ones.

As for commentary, there is Commentary. When it comes to depth, one issue is worth 200 issues of Newsweek.

And that's the secret, to find the sources that are worth the time and scan through the others. Going through newspapers and magazines is like panning for gold and there are days when you know that your time would be better spent reading a book, but you still look for the nuggets.

Call it gold fever.

Tory Rock

National Review has assembled an amusing list of the top 50 conservative rock and roll songs.

They forgot "Work, Work" by Hubb Kapp and the Wheels.

Quote of the Day

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

- Fred Thompson

Novel Break

To take a break from management books, I'm reading The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.

An extraordinary, fictional trip back to several generations of a family in Austria-Hungary. Memorable characters, atmosphere, and a real plot; in other words, unlike many of the current novels.

"Merit is my caste."

More on the affirmative action controversy in India.

Muscle Car

The concept car wowed the critics.

Will GM bring back the Camaro?

Chills and Thrills in the Corner Office

This Christian Science Monitor article examines the impact of the Enron convictions on the corner office.

Prediction: These stories always have impact for a while, then it's back to the usual practices, whether they be honest or warped. As has been said, organizations get the results for which they are designed.

Have I Read This Bench?

Okay, I'm a book-lover. That's why I like these benches in Istanbul.

Don't Sugar-Coat It!

Slow Leadership has a great post on Robert Sutton's "90% of management advice is crap" theory.

Actually, that figure sounds a little low.

Statistics: Reliable and Otherwise

The Harvard Management Update gives five guidelines for using statistics.

Good stuff too, but I'd better round up something light for the blog before I drive off all of the number-phobic readers.

Saber Sale

As a service to geeks everywhere, I want to announce that Think Geek is having a sale on its Star Wars FX light sabers.

Now you can own two.

The Employee You'll Never Forget

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