Reverse Engineering

Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users asks a question about how we want our customers to think about us...and gives a secret answer.

Wimpishness Update

Articles like this one about the Pope make me understand theories such as this one.

Face Time

No great surprise: Telecommuting can kill your career.

Petraeus Profile

An interesting profile of General David Petraeus, the new commander of American forces in Iraq. An excerpt:

Petraeus has been assiduous in matching his reputation as a field soldier with his reputation as an intellect. He not only earned a doctorate from Prince ton's Woodrow Wilson School--writing on the effects of the Vietnam war on civil-military relations--but also keeps himself maniacally fit. The speed of his recovery from a gunshot wound received on a rifle range when he was commanding a battalion in the 101st Airborne is legendary. (The wound required a five-hour operation--performed by Dr. Bill Frist.)

Further, Petraeus is coming off a successful tenure as head of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. While this job took a winning commander away from his war at a crucial moment, it has helped Petraeus polish his institutional credentials in a way that will now serve him well. The main efforts during his 15 months in Kansas were the recasting of Army training for counterinsurgency operations and the creation of a new counterinsurgency field manual. The manual has gotten tremendous attention and is now quoted in every profile of Petraeus, but he sagely conceived the new doctrine as process more than product, as dialogue more than decalogue. Petraeus brought in not only a good number of academics and experts, but Marines as well as soldiers. The manual is, importantly, a two-service publication, and Petraeus worked well with Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis--another tremendously successful commander in Iraq, a serious thinker, and a folk hero to Marines. Mattis's message to Iraqis was that they could have "no better friend, no worse enemy" than the Marines. Petraeus will be sending a similar message to Baghdadis.

People Update

Jacqueline Bissett is 62 and looking good.

Ann Althouse discusses the controversy over casting 13-year-old Dakota Fanning in a rape scene.

Sally Spitfire is a professional pillow-fighter.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander is cutting jobs and looking at a smarter phone.

Robert Hughes was stoned on hashish when he got a call from a drunken editor offering him the job as art critic for Time magazine. [HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]

The Incan Code

Incan civilization was a technological marvel. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, they found an empire that spanned nearly 3,000 miles, from present-day Ecuador to Chile, all served by a high-altitude road system that included 200-foot suspension bridges built of woven reeds. It was the Inca who constructed Machu Picchu, a cloud city terraced into a precarious stretch of earth hanging between two Andean peaks. They even put together a kind of Bronze Age Internet, a system of messenger posts along the major roads. In one day, Incan runners amped on coca leaves could relay news some 150 miles down the network.

Yet, if centuries of scholarship are to be believed, the Inca, whose rule began 2,000 years after Homer, never figured out how to write. It's an enigma known as the Inca paradox, and for nearly 500 years it has stood as one of the great historical puzzles of the Americas. But now a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton may be close to untangling the mystery.

Read the rest of the Wired article here.

Miscellaneous and Fast

Clifford Irving is finally making money on his Howard Hughes hoax.

The number of German converts to Islam has risen. Details in this Spiegel report.

Joshua Muravchik, writing in Commentary, nominates Jimmy Carter as our worst ex-president.

Here's the science on the health benefits of red wine.

CareerJournal has advice on when the boss gives the silent treatment.

Quote of the Day

Most people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.

- Robert Orben

Wharton on Home Depot

Some professors at The Wharton School weigh in on what happened at Home Depot.

A preview: What CEO Nardelli learned at General Electric was not a good fit for Home Depot's decentralized culture.

How Personnel Selection Resembles Politics

We are into the political season and the prospects of various candidates carry lessons for anyone who wants to see how organizations make personnel selections. Here are a few:

• The skills that are needed to get selected are not necessarily the ones needed to perform the job.
• Being nice will get you a long way and being likeable even farther.
• You must look the part. Personal appearance matters.
• Humor can be dangerous.
• No off-hand remark is minor and nothing is off-the-record.
• Being articulate helps but it is not the only consideration. There are many articulate bumblers.
• It may not be fair, but your past has a way of catching up with you.
• The best resume does not always get the job nor should it.
• The ones who promise you the most are not always your friends.
• Your allies may come from unexpected quarters. The same applies to your enemies.
• The prize often goes to the relatively noncontroversial, and not the best qualified, candidate.
• Selections should be nondiscriminatory on the basis of race, sex, and other irrelevant factors but many times they aren't. Both bigotry and tokenism are alive and well.
• If you represent change, then the selection board must see a compelling reason for it or you will be seen as unnecessarily disruptive.
• Optimism usually trumps pessimism.
• You don't get far by bad-mouthing the entire organization.
• Negatives about opponents are best raised by others.
• Timing matters.