Alpha Mind Blog

When I started the Alpha Mind blog over three years ago, my goal was to have a podcast join the blog within a few months. In reality, my service to the church and some other constraints kept me from launching the podcast.

Now, I find myself ready to do it, and am counting down the 4 weeks until launch.

I’m not just counting, though. I’m making preliminary and somewhat experimental episodes. There will be 4 of them, numbered from -3 (minus 3) up to 0 (zero). After that, of course, comes Ep. 1 and the real launch of the podcast.

Episode -3 is about the Galveston Flood of 1900, and about how the city got its present seawall, but got it a bit late, after 6 to 8 thousand people died in the 1900 hurricane.

The episode also mentions the Pig War, the last armed conflict between the U.S.A and Great Britain, and without doubt the jolliest, happiest, shiniest war in American history.

And amid all that compulsive story-telling, there really is a how-to lesson in being a thought leader, which goes something like this:

If you’re going to influence people, and they’re going to make important decisions, it helps to be right. History will be nicer to you that way.

Seth Godin in an unusually arch rant about an editor’s work on his manuscript:

Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it.

By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical.

It reminds me of Kathy Sierra’s excellent post—one of her classics, I think—called “Keep the sharp edges!” Kathy’s post focuses mostly on how committees are incapable of producing the remarkable, because groupthink is naturally a process by which rough edges and sharp corners are sanded smooth. In product markets, she goes on to say, product become more and more alike through this process.

Seth is writing about a single person’s effect on his work, but he acknowledges it’s a matter of corporate (i.e. shared) responsibility.

I need to be really clear. She’s not at fault. She did exactly what she was supposed to do. The fault lies in the job description, not the job.

When I buy a book by Seth Godin, I want it to sound like Seth Godin, not like Seth strained through several layers of bleached muslin.

It’s a lesson that is hard-won in my own life. I’m a reasonably facile writer, but a long period of my life, my first 30 years in fact, was one great writer’s block. What broke me out of it was to learn that while knowing proper English is a very good thing, when one writes, propriety had better not be the goal, you need to go for effectiveness.

I can be more concrete. I used to fuss over poetry manuscripts, because I couldn’t find a way to say what I wanted to say in a way that was both stylistically powerful and grammatically perfect. The revelation for me was when I was listening for the zillionth time to “Fun Fun Fun” by the beach boys. And I suddenly realized that the first two lines are both abominable English and a work of rare genius.

Let me remind you.

Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised to the hamburger stand now.

See she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.

That second line is purt-near unparseable. It’s also perfect, absolutely perfect. A gem, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It captures the late 50s in a drop of clearest amber.

A dear friend of mine in Berkeley recently pointed out that I’m the only person she’s heard use the word “bodacious” since 1982 or so. I think she might have meant it as a criticism. I can only smile. I don’t use the word often, but when I think about excising it from my vocabulary, the prospect strikes me much the same as if somebody at Coke pointed out they could use a tiny bit less syrup in the drink and nobody would notice. Brand dilution.

Dowsing for clients: Seth, B. L. Ochman, and my business card

Seth Godin has everything to do with why I spent almost 50 hours creating my latest business card.

In case you went and looked at that post but didn’t read B.L. Ochman’s comment, I’ll repeat it here:

…when I had my own PR firm, in another life, I used to do something very similar to your new card. But frankly, i think there are more simple ways to make the point.

B. L. misses something important: My card is not just a way for me to tell something, but, and just as importantly, to learn.

When somebody phones me on the basis of that card, I know they’re already, in a very important way, a qualified prospect. They’re somebody I’ll be able to work with.

That card puts me on probation before I ever even talk to the prospect. And if I’ve passed that probation, the prospect has as well. Lots of people will toss that card, seeing me as a weirdo. The ones who call will be see me as their kind of weirdo. And in working together, that will make all the difference.

I’m dowsing not for clients but for the kind of clients I want to work for. If I don’t find them, I’ll just keep writing what I want to write, record some podcasts and preach the gospel, and earn the right to do those things by digging ditches if that’s what it takes.

I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

Someone discusses leadership, and Jim Stroup dissects that discussion. And in the process gives a fine quick overview of one of the prime rhetorical stop signs:

The thing that struck me about this particular presentation was its unapologetic brandishing of the “of course” debating technique. This, actually, isn’t properly debate at all, but rhetorical intimidation. One preemptively dissipates any doubt detected stirring the audience about one’s claim with a half-surprised, half indignant bark: “of course.”

From Mark Driehorst, a fine post about a problematic issue in social media: lynch mobs.

I saw things get ugly on YouTube this summer, as a virtual lynch mob formed against LisaNova, one of YT’s most popular directors.

Here are two of my responses…

…the serious…

…and the silly (but not a lot less serious than the other, really):

As you can tell from looking at the videos on my YouTube channel, I got way too involved with LisaNova this summer. But it was the quality of her best videos that got me involved with YouTube in the first place. And she and I had had a pleasant exchange of emails before she became YT’s most notorious “spammer” (in quotes because although she spammed I can’t think of a word that really says what she is). So I was quite distressed when she got so much hate thrown at her that she took more than a month off.

I don’t like spammers. Not at all. But I like lynchings even less.If “thought leader” has an opposite, I think “lynch mob leader” is probably it.

Thx to Kami Huyse for the link to Mike’s post.

And, oh, if you haven’t discovered LisaNova yet, here are two of my favorite videos: Teenie Weenie RAW & UNCENSORED, and Breaking News!!!

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.

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.)

We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.

Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance.

This book concerns itself with how ideas are realized. It is a book about thinking, but its focus is not every kind of thought, but that sort of thought which aims toward an idea’s realization in the world outside its originator’s mind. In studying this matter I have, like many before me, found it to be immense. It is as if, wanting to explore the Azores, I had set out from Lisbon and discovered the Americas. The subject contains worlds; whole, well-established arts and sciences are encompassed within it. This, I believe, is why it is so little studied: academics by the nature of their work must go deep, so that each of them can necessarily study only part of a field so vast. Yet as a subject of keen interest to many people in many stations, thoughtcraft deserves, if possible, to be made manageable.

My model for this effort is a military document which, in two editions, has been made public. It is the small book Warfighting, and it treats warfare at a high conceptual level. At around twenty thousand words, it is a small book on a vast topic, yet, by staying above details, it conveys considerable wisdom in a short read. Like many war manuals, it has become standard reading for business executives. Its design is to establish for its readers (U.S. Marines) a common understanding of what is undertaken when a war is fought. My aims are similar, and so I use Warfighting as a model for this essay: “short and easily read.” My goal has been to discern the most important twenty thousand words that can be said about thoughtcraft and say them.
I borrow from Warfighting not only its brevity but its style, because those who need and will engage with my ideas are those for whom thinking is done in warlike environments, where much as at stake and thinking can seldom be allowed to become reverie. (I treat reverie seriously, as a legitimate and valuable form of thought, but those engaged in it will find little motivation to seek out my advice as to how it should be done.) Also, Warfighting is a very cold book about an art, and legitimately so. War encompasses many engineering problems, but is not itself such a problem. The warrior deals in too many uncertainties, and must make too many judgments in unclear circumstances, to succeed only through engineering. And so it is with thoughtcraft.

The quest of an idea for realization is in some sense a quest for territory. In most cases, that territory is other human minds. Even if an idea’s realization will be in a physical object, it must, in most cases, need to find its champions and defeat its opponents. At the heart of this book, then, lies the relationships between the thought and its thinker, and between the communicated idea and its receiver. Crucial, too, is the idea’s fate at the hands of multiple hearers, who will reject, adopt, or adapt it.

The highest duty of any leader in any group is to think clearly, creatively, flexibly, and effectively, and to help their organization to do so. And the highest duty of anyone who originates an idea is to give that idea its best opportunity to be realized and of benefit. This book is intended to provide practical guidance for both. It is not, however, a book of procedures and techniques. Rather, it provides a framework for discerning and understanding the challenges which face ideas and thinkers. Despite a certain arrogance in taking on so vast a subject in so few words, I offer it humbly, in hopes that it will be of help.

Kathy Sierra: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, etc.

She asks the rhetorical question (I paraphrase), “Why do we still go to conferences when there are so many media to bring them to us.”

Here’s my list of reasons:

• One-on one in crowds. Why is it more fun to see a movie with someone else? Because, even if you’re too polite to talk to each other loudly, you still hear, see, sense each other reacting, in real time. Your companion’s reaction shapes and informs yours, and enriches the whole experience. You’re seeing a different movie when you see it with someone else.
• One-on-a-few in crowds. Even the best video-conferencing tools can’t capture this. The few people sitting near you provide (decreasingly with increased distance) the same thing your one companion provides. We are made to do things in groups, and we are made to read each other.
• Giving what you get. What companions give us, we give them, and we get a kick out of it.

All in all, I think giving is the most important thing, even when it’s on the very subtle level. Here’s an example:

My friend Lee Hopkins is one of the most skilled appreciators I know. One of the many persons he appreciates is Kathy Sierra. Why would he want to be in the audience rather than sitting at home seeing live video of her speech? Because, even if he’s sitting 13 rows back, she just might see him, hanging on every word, contributing his wee mite to what a good audience does for a good speaker.

I admit this list is partial, and admit further that Kathy’s probably right that no list is likely to cover all the reasons face time matters. It’s just my wee mite.

Trafcom News: How teens communicate in 2007. A fine post by Donna. Laughed out loud.

The whole post is funny, but am I alone in thinking it takes a very serious, perhaps grave tone at the end?

And let’s all think about these teens coming to work in our organizations in a few years.

Part of the post’s thrust is that teenagers are failing to learn, or are unlearning, key communications competencies:

Teens have lost the skill needed to ring a bell or knock on a door. No more: “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver, can the Beave come out to play?” Instead, today’s teens stand on the front porch, or in their cars if they are 16+, and call the person inside the house, using the mobile phone conveniently glued to the palm of the hand.

If Donna reads her own post the way I read it, then, there is a real foreboding in that ending. If kids don’t know how to knock at a door, how many other skills will they be missing when they enter the workforce?

Of course, Donna may not see things as grimly as I. Perhaps I’m seeing (more than others do? more than is real?) that our new technologies for instant communication lead to superficial communication. If I can use my cell phone to avoid meeting the Beave’s mom at the door, then, while I still know the Beave, I’m missing an important piece of deep information about him, to wit: what’s his mother like and how does she behave at the boundary of her domain? I hope I don’t need to explain how this is information about Beaver. Without it, my understanding of him is just slightly diminished, my relationship with him slightly less rich than it might have been.

(photo by permission Jana Werner)