Alpha Mind Blog

So, I was more than half right.

When I cornered Hugh at Tuesday’s geek dinner, he told me that while he’s not a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, he really likes Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of Fear and Loathing. Which after all was what I really had in mind.

I enjoyed Hugh’s talk about his work in his video with Scoble.

We hear lots about how to hire smart, less about how to fire.

But today, Seth Godin and Jim Stroup give us a perfectly matched pair of stories about just that. Please read both; each story strengthens the other in a big way.

A bit more about that code of ethics thing (see my last post).

One of the reasons it’s dangerous to ascribe motives to another person is that it’s really hard for any of us to understand motives, our own or anyone else’s.

Let’s go down that path, tricky as it is, and talk about the motivations that might have been at work last week as the House of Representatives considered the Free Flow of Information Act.

To cut to the chase: before passing the bill, the house watered down the protections afforded journalists who shield their sources.

Declan McCullagh has laid out the steps by which the language was modified as the bill was considered. The crucial point here (and how this relates to my last post on Citizen Journalism Ethics) is that the bill managed to exclude most bloggers from its protections. Here’s the final language:

The term “covered person” means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

In other words, not I nor (probably) you.

Why does money make a difference? Why should those who get paid to do journalism be afforded protection that you and I don’t have?

Now perhaps I’m going to shock you by suggesting there may have been a perfectly good and sound motive at work here. Plenty of others have mentioned the crasser motives that may be at work (read the comments to Declan’s post.)

But what if… what if the legislators used money as a proxy for something else? For example, a code of ethics?

I’ll clarify. Much as they love to make laws which restrict people’s freedoms, legislators also have some grasp of the notion that those who self-police don’t need to be policed by others.

But how can we identify those who self-police? Well, generally it’s done by seeing that they belong to a group which collectively self-polices. And in the case of journalism, that would be professional journalists, who have a code of ethics, and not bloggers, who don’t.

That journalists might often ignore their own codes of ethics is not to the point. The legislators must operate under the assumption that the codes are largely observed, even if not universally. If they’d believed that such professional codes were worthless, they’d have been much more likely to treat professionals as they’ve treated bloggers.

Now comes the question that has to do with thoughcraft: If the House had meant ”professionals should be protected because they have a code of ethics which protects the rest of us from their behaving like scoundrels,” why didn’t they say so?

Well, indeed, some of them might have said so in their discussions; I haven’t read the record and just now I don’t intend to. But it’s just possible that that was what they meant even if they didn’t say so. And they didn’t say so because they knew, deep down, that to talk about journalistic ethics would open cans of worms none of them wanted to deal with.

Now what I am confident of is that there must have been some mention of bloggers in those discussions. And what I’m equally confident of is that the question of a code of ethics would have been very unlikely to come up at those moments.

Why? Because a code of ethics for bloggers is about as unthinkable among Representatives as it is among bloggers.

Here’s a snippet from chapter 10 of Thoughtcraft:

We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.

Many of the reasons bloggers rejected the Bloggers’ Code of Conduct were intuitive. So much so, in fact, that non-bloggers, such as U.S. Representatives, might grasp them intuitively. So that, instead of explicitly naming the missing code of ethics as the reason for not protecting bloggers, the lawmakers instead chose a proxy—money, which makes a professional—which satisfied them. And which did so without opening the can of worms that lay in the question “So do journalists actually abide by a code of ethics?”

Kami Huyse is making me rethink the bloggers’ code of conduct. The idea of a code was put forward by Tim O’Reilly after Kathy Sierra decided to shut down her Creating Passionate Users blog due to harassment.

The Bloggers’ Code died not with a bang but a whimper, and I was happy to let it. But Kami has got me thinking about it again with her post on ethics among journalists and PR practitioners. The point of her post is that few in either group even read their respective codes of ethics. According to Kami, this is a Bad Thing.

But if journalists should be reading and abiding by their own code of ethics, and if bloggers are the new citizen journalists, then shouldn’t they be reading and abiding by their own code? And wouldn’t that involve having one?

O’Reilly’s draft code had a lot more to do with simple decent conduct than with our taking seriously our roles as journalists. But a code like his would have started us down that path, and maybe that’s where we need to go.

(The foregoing is part I, the simple part of this post. My next post will get a little trickier, going into the depths of what my Alpha Mind blog is all about.)

Aha! I think I’ve discovered one of the keys to Hugh’s more incomprehensible cartoons. Today he used the phrase “bad craziness,” then qualifies said craziness as being “most of it positive.” If I remember (and I have a nasty good memory), “bad craziness” is a caption or thought balloon or something in one of the original illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Come clean, Hugh! Fear and Loathing has admitted to keeping Hugh MacLeod in his back pocket. Will you admit to keeping Fear and Loathing in yours? Or at least in your brainpan? Sometimes the similarity between your cartoons and those in the book is scary. (For that matter, your ‘toons themselves are scary. But I love ‘em.)

Looks like I’ve got the scoop: this is the first publication of this press release:
———————————————–
POLITICIAN LOBBIES BUSINESS ON BEHALF OF THE EARTH
How Loni Hancock’s Green Passion May Influence California Small Business Strategy

Richmond, California – October 1, 2007. California Assembly Member Loni Hancock’s choice for Small Business of the Year in Legislative District 14 has been invited to help the California Small Business Roundtable (SBR) formulate strategy. Excellent Packaging & Supply, a producer and distributor of earth-friendly food packaging, was selected by Assembly Member Hancock for its green credentials, and now has received the call from SBR on the basis of its dynamic, proactive management. Yet, if not for some coaxing by Hancock, none of it would have happened.

Excellent Packaging, represented by co-owners Steve Levine and Allen King, is one of five small companies invited by SBR to its yearly retreat, which will be held on October 7 and 8 in Half Moon Bay, on the San Francisco peninsula. The five firms were selected from the seventy-five small businesses honored by their local Assembly Members at this year’s annual Small Business Day in Sacramento.

The relationship between the company and the legislator started slowly. King, the firm’s president, recalls that when Hancock’s office first called and asked Excellent Packaging to be part of a Town Hall meeting on the environment in Berkeley, he declined. But Hancock wouldn’t accept that answer, and the invitation was repeated. Here’s how Hancock explains why she pressed the issue: “With over 40% growth in the past two years, and no signs of slowing down, EPS has demonstrated that it is possible to be a successful small business while at the same time doing its part to contribute to the sustainability of the planet.”

The environment is no new concern on Hancock’s part. Her web site proudly announces that hers was the first Assembly District Office in California to be certified as a green business. She chairs the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, and does all she can to be a green influence well beyond the legislative sphere. For example, she actively collaborates with the Green Chamber of Commerce to educate businesses in how to become green-certified. “So our asking Excellent Packaging a second time was consistent with everything Assemblywoman Hancock does,” said an aide in Hancock’s office.

“When she asked us again,” says King, “I realized she was right.” At first, he explains, he’d thought that EPS had little to contribute. “But then it hit me that since we care about making a real difference, we have a duty to raise our profile a little, and let others see how a green business can succeed.” EPS participated in the Berkeley event, which Hancock considered a success. She went on to name Excellent Packaging the Small Business of the Year for her district.

When King received the award at Small Business Day in May, his brief acceptance message made a strong impression on leaders of the Small Business Roundtable. “We are looking for talented new blood,” says Betty Jo Toccoli, Chair of the Roundtable, “and Allen impressed several of us as a dynamic, proactive thinker.” From that impression came the invitation the Roundtable extended to King and Levine.

The Small Business Roundtable was created to develop strategy for the advocacy program of the California Small Business Association, which represents over 203,000 small business owners statewide. The company has a voice as far away as Washington, through its delegates to the White House Conference on Small Business, as well as, of course, a strong presence in Sacramento. So if, through the presence of King and Levine at the SBR retreat, the Small Business Association’s lobbying has a bit more green to it next year than in the past, Loni Hancock will know that the influence began in her office and is simply coming full circle.

Before I start talking about ancient Greek literature, let me assure you that I’m talking to you. Not only that, but I’m talking about you, and about your life. I’m talking about how you can win friends and influence people, how you can be an Alpha Mind, and how you can realize your dreams.

Promise. Cross my heart. That’s what I’m talking about here. Just bear with me while I go back a few millennia. I’ll bring it back to you. Really.

Okay. Ahem. I draw a deep breath and begin.

There are two kinds of people in the world. There’s a very large group who have never read Herodotus. Then there is a smaller group who are in love with Herodotus.

Oh, all right, then, I suppose there are a few who have read Herodotus and haven’t fallen in love, but I think these are people who lack the capacity to understand something essential about him:

Herodotus was writing about us, about our age, about our lives.

Every good storyteller does that. And every good story does that.

Now, I’ll admit Herodotus didn’t always clearly signal that he was writing about the future, about us. That’s why I chose not to make his mistake. That’s why I told you up front that, even though I’m going far back in time and far away in space, I’m talking about you and your life.

Because not everybody has the same capacity to understand this for themselves. In consequence, not everybody has the same capacity to be bowled over by great storytelling. Or more importantly, to be taught by it. That’s why some need help.

Okay, now a story from Herotodus. A very old story. But wait! Wait! I can bring this much closer to home because this very story was in a movie not too long ago.

In “The English Patient,” Katherine Clifton reads our story from Herodotus, aloud, around a campfire. The story is the one about Candaules and how he lost the kingdom of Lydia to Gyges.

To put it briefly, Candaules goes crazy for his wife, and having decided she’s the most beautiful woman in existence, decides he also needs to prove this to someone else. So he arranges for Gyges, his right-hand man, to see her naked. She learns of it, is outraged, and gives Gyges a choice: either kill Candaules and take the throne, or else be killed himself. Choosing to live, he kills his boss and takes the wife and the kingdom.

(Yes, Herodotus tells it better. I’m hurrying up to get to my own point.)

That is the story within the story. The story of the English Patient is this: Geoffrey Clifton, husband of Katharine, has half an insight (alas only half!) about this tale. He knows that Candaules’ obsession with his wife parallels his own obsession with Katherine.

What he fails to understand is how parallel the parallel actually is. He sees that he suffers the same uxorious daftness, but fails to hear the cautionary tale. He brags about his own excessive adoration for Katherine, but also about Katherine herself. And in the midst of this inane display, Almásy (the “English Patient”) falls in love with her. All of which results in death for all three, with gruesome injuries and horrid, lingering storytelling for Almásy.

Who can know how much Geoffrey’s silly spotlighting of Katherine contributed to the dreadful outcome? But it clearly did nothing to prevent it.

Geoffrey Clifton, alas, had only a partial capacity to understand that Herodotus, 2400 years earlier and without knowing a thing about airplanes or World War II, was writing about Geoffrey Clifton.

In the same way, I think, those few scholars and artists who sneer at Herodotus have failed to grasp how, in “The Fox and the Grapes,” Aesop, that other ancient Grecian, was writing about them. After all, here they are, living about 2600 years after the invention of literature…

Here they are, looking on a man who lived within a fewscore decades of that invention, and was making up a whole genre as he went along, and doing it masterfully…

Here they are, utterly incapable of rising to anything like the level of that old long-dead talebearer…

And so of course they are forced to say, “ah, those grapes couldn’t be any good anyway.”

Which only shows them to be particularly, especially, notably dense. Because, unlike Herodotus, Aesop tacked onto the end of each of his stories a big sign, in block capitals, underlined, saying “Here’s how this story is about you and your future.”

A very sad fact about humanity is that not only are many people so dense that they can’t read the big, underlined, block-caps signs plastered over a great story, but, oh worse! …

All of us are that dense, at least in places. In our blind spots.

Those of us who aspire to thought leadership face many choices. Once we know what point we want to make, we face a multitude of ways we might go about making it. Each decision we make leads to other decisions. Once we have chosen a particular story to convey our point, we still face a question as fundamental as: “After the story, do I tell them what I told them, like Aesop, or leave them to figure it out for themselves, like Herodotus?”

In this one instance, I’m going to be as obvious as Aesop. I’m going to make explicit what this post has implicitly assumed:

If thou wouldst influence the thoughts of others, thou shalt tell stories.

Why? Because people instinctively know that every good story is about the future. Is about their future. That’s why they listen to stories, remember them, tell and retell them.

The question for the would-be Alpha Mind is how to use the natural human interest in stories, not merely to say what we want to say, but to convey it into the part of the hearer’s brain, wherever it may be, where it will make a difference.

We’ll begin exploring this by looking at how people really feel about the six Ws. Hint: they don’t teach it in journalism school, but every good journalist understands it, even if only at the instinctive, know-it-so-well-we-don’t-know-we-know-it level. The level at which all of us understand grammar.

The six Ws: that’s where we’ll pick this up in the next post.