Bock: Being Smart Isn't Enough

Wally Bock on how to be successful even if you're smart.

"How I Learned to Love the Draft"

Yet I am grateful for having served. Doing so took me out of my own social class and ethnic milieu—big-city, middle-class, Jewish—and gave me a vivid sense of the social breadth of my country. I slept in barracks and shared all my meals with American Indians, African Americans from Detroit, white Appalachians, Christian Scientists from Kansas, and discovered myself befriending and being befriended by young men I would not otherwise have met. I have never felt more American than when I was in the Army.

Read all of Joseph Epstein's essay in The Atlantic.

Head North. Way North.

Sippican Cottage is always a glimmer of light in the darkness.

Here's an excerpt but read the whole thing:

I went to the Aubuchon Hardware store. I do believe I have paid the mortgage on that place by fixing this or that in my house continuously for five years. There is a lumber yard five miles away from my house, a Home Depot about an hour's drive, and the Aubuchon. I go to the lumber yard for large oblong things. I go to Aubuchon for doyouhaves and willthisfits and goddamnedthings and owmyhands. If you had a bayonet in my back I wouldn't go all the way to Home Depot for anything. You really have to wear pants to go to the orange place in the big city of Auburn. They check, or notice, or something.

Disclosure

I recommend handing over the interview questions to job candidates when they come in for an interview. Give them a few minutes to look over the questions and collect their thoughts, then let them answer the questions in whichever order they choose. 

By doing so, you reduce the tension on all sides. In essence, you let them interview themselves while you take notes and ask follow-up questions.

There is an unnecessary adversarial or "gotcha" aspect to many parts of life. 

Remove it and you can achieve better results.

Quote of the Day

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. 

- Mark Twain

The Marvelous Mr. Wolfe

Yes Virginia, there is a Tom Wolfe page.

Film Break

The trailers for:

• "War and Peace"
• "Kill Your Darlings"

Training Rooms

Training rooms lack the predictability of classrooms. Depending upon the size and resources of the organization, training rooms can be extravagant or spartan. 

I fondly recall a floor of training rooms in Houston. Freshly-baked cookies would be brought in for the breaks. Teaching amid the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can be a pleasant experience.

Spartan, however, is far more common and you can quickly tell if an instructor had anything to do with the design and equipment. I've taught in rooms that resembled the lengthy interior of an airliner, had flip charts that could barely stand, and used audio-visual equipment from the Harding administration.

In those instances, one suspects that executive training is done off-site at a resort or hotel and that the ultra-basic facilities are for the rest of the team.

But perhaps I've become cynical.

Late Night Reading

The two books currently hidden beneath my bed covers are Ghostwritten by David Mitchell and God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson. 

The first is a novel and the second is nonfiction. Both are beautifully written. An excerpt from Ghostwritten:

There's a police office he could go and scare, but I took Suhbataar straight to the museum to enquire after Bodoo. The door was locked, but Suhbataar can open any door in Mongolia. Inside was similar to the last museum, booming with silence. Suhbataar found the curator's office empty. A large, stuffed buzzard incorrectly labeled as a condor hung down from the ceiling. One of its glass eyes had dropped and rolled away somewhere.

An excerpt from God's Secretaries:

The state church could not tolerate the freedom or the priestlessness of such behaviour. Many Separatists - and they were overwhelmingly young, idealisitic people, a tiny minority, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred in England as a whole - fled to the Netherlands but others were arrested and, eventually, some fifty-two were held for long periods in the string of hideous London gaols: the Clink, the Gatehouse, the Fleet, Newgate, the Counter Woodstreet, the Counter Poultry, Bridewell and the White Lion, some of the prisoners shut in the "most noisome and vile dungeons', without 'bedds, or so much as straw to lye upon . . . and all this, without once producing them, to anie Christian triall where they might have place given them, to defend themselves'. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year.

In-House Counsel

A while back, I advised a chief executive officer to restrict his use of outside counsel to specialties and have an attorney on staff to handle the weekly and daily concerns that arise in a large organization.

He was convinced that his approach was less expensive. In some respects that can be correct and yet there is one area where it is grossly inferior: You want your managers and supervisors to seek legal advice as early as possible. They are more likely to do so when the lawyer is simply an employee down the hall rather than a distant figure in a lofty law firm who can only be approached after prior clearance..

Five minutes of legal advice can save millions of dollars and a bunch of heartache but it needs to be timely. Set up barriers and you may get costly delays.