Alpha Mind Blog

Somehow four or five days elapsed between recording last week’s episode and uploading it, which happened only a few minutes ago. (The delay was mostly due to a lot of experimentation with post-production techniques, and some Vista hassles.)

In Episode minus 2, I introduce Peter Drucker as a guiding light of the Alpha Mind Podcast. I also introduce the alternating-episodes approach I’ll be taking in the ‘cast, modeled after Drucker’s career-long alternation of management books with ones on broader social issues.

I also compare Seth Godin and Christopher Penn to Drucker, and one of them comes out looking pretty good.

Drucker was passionate about management because he cared deeply about the human family. He had also seen (up close, very close) that perfectionist political systems were deadly. He believed that the organizations that make up a free and pluralist society can do much to further human happiness—if run well. And so he loved teaching us how to run them well.

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.

Shel Israel, discussing how BuzzLogic Calculates Influence, says:

What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media’s goals is less tangible.

(emphasis mine)

What he’s referring to at the start of the quote is Kami Huyse’s wonderful work calculating the ROI of the Sea World San Antonio campaign that launched their new roller coaster. It was a great case study by a fast-rising star of social PR.

But I’m struck by that last sentence of Shel’s quote (and not only by the grammatical gaffe.) When I heard Shel Holtz discussing Kami’s work on For Immediate Release, as soon as he mentioned measurement of ROI, and before he got into the meat of the segment, I remember thinking “Who measures the ROI of having a desk or wearing decent clothes?”

Yes, when you launch a social media campaign, you ought to think about how you’ll define and measure success. But if you’re still on the fence about using social media at all, I believe it’s time you started thinking about having a presence (on Twitter and a blog at minimum) in much the same way you think about basic office equipment and your business wardrobe. No, a social media presence isn’t a minimum requirement of doing business, not just yet, but that corner will be turned so soon, so suddenly, and so quietly, that you’re safest–by far–turning the corner yourself as soon as you can.

A fine, quick lesson in persuasion from Andrew Cline at Rhetorica. Worth checking out even if only to learn the spiffy word “enthymeme.” Say it over and over. What a great word!

Mike Masnick asks: Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary? The answer is in this video on YouTube. Titled “Eyes On the Fair Use of the Prize,” it tells how an outstanding documentary from the 1980s has been effectively disappeared by copyright burdens:

Just after posting my last post, about how thoroughly up-to-here I’ve had it with stuff that doesn’t work, Google Reader brought me Lee’s feed, with this post.

Lee, my friend, it happens that I do have some advice:

Admit that Mrs. BetterComms is right. For technology that really works, is really mobile, is really supported, you’ll need to pay enterprise prices. I’m afraid that’s just all there is to it.

Full disclosure: I gave up on all of it while I was still on a paltry pastor’s salary, and I suppose I could now pay a bit more and might get some cocktail of ingredients that works. But, for now, here’s what I’ve settled on:

I keep my contacts (a quite large number) in a very old version of ACT!

I keep my calendar and my to-do lists on my Palm, using Palm’s basic, native applications. I don’t use Palm’s to-do list app, because I need too many different lists (they’re context-specific, a la David Allen). So they’re simply in Palm Memos.

I write notes on whatever I find, and I clear all the notes out of my wallet fairly often so they’ll get into the software.

I have to keep using:

• a linux laptop (for video editing)…
• a Vista laptop (which is my basic business machine now)…
• a Win XP laptop (because elements of my podcast rig won’t work with Vista)…
• and a Palm Z22 because I don’t need anything fancier in a PDA, and even if I bought something snazzy I know full well I’d never get its apps to work across the other platforms.

And I will absolutely not attempt to get my do-lists, contacts, and calendar all working across all these machines until I have at least US$4K and a full week to throw at the problem. And I won’t put my data online until I find Internet service that’s truly ubiquitous and fully trustworthy (I believe this is a long way off.)

I’ll be curious to see how others advise you. For now I’m happy with a non-integrated, somewhat low-tech solution.

BTW, Lee, I think you meant U3, not E3.

P.S. New additions to my list of stuff that doesn’t work:

• Enidicia electronic postage (U.S. only) doesn’t work with Vista.
• Twitter
• Jaiku (gave up on that piece of trash a month ago, should have been 5 months)
• URLtea, which went down for days last week, after I’ve sent out a lot of URLS using the service. None of those URLs worked, of course, because the whole URLtea server was MIA.

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.”

Seth says forget the resume. Heather Hamilton says Seth is leading people astray. Neville Hobson, on the For Immediate Release podcast, says “Seth has a point, but we’re not there yet.”

I agree with all of them, but mostly with Neville.

I had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second part.

Why is Neville the one I agree with most? Because…

The simple fact is that Seth Godin is all about the future. He writes for the bleeding-edge denizens of that brave world into which all of us, will we-nill we, are being carried by the Internet.

It’s a world in which monolithic companies and monopolistic brands are playing an ever-shrinking role. In which, as a direct result, there is more and more work to be done that won’t be done by people in jobs, as conventionally defined. And even less work being done by the kinds of jobs Seth refers to as being “a cog in a giant machine.”

So, my nutshell observations about all this:

1. Seth is right. If you’re outstanding, a resume will only serve as an excuse to reject you. “Look, it doesn’t matter that you learned Perl in a two-day weekend well enough that you were teaching it on Monday. We need somebody who knows Python.”
2. Heather is right. The vast majority of jobs, even some world-changing jobs, jobs people kill for, still require a resume. Heather’s company, Microsoft, is still changing the world in some wonderful ways. (Although I once scorched the inexcusable Word 2007 in this blog, I’m writing this post on Windows Live Writer, which MS executed brilliantly.) Most jobs at her company are still choice morsels, and if she says you need a resume to get ‘em, well, I trust her.
3. Neville is right, in that Seth will be more and more right, for more and more people, as time goes on. The world is moving Godin-ward.

Now, a bit of my own experience.

The most interesting job I’ve ever held, by far, I got without a resume. (It was also the best-paying.) A friend told me she’d given my name to someone who was creating a new position, and a few hours later, he called. It was 1997, when web sites were too new for most companies, and I had the nerve to walk into my interview without a resume, but with a web site for this prospective employer’s company. I’d created it the night before based on what I learned from a few phone calls.

A twist, though: I was asked for a resume, after the hiring decision had been made. “I just need to show the management team you’re a real person,” was how the owner and president put it. And that, I believe, is how many job seekers should be thinking during this period of transition to a more Godin world. Have a resume. But offer it last, and give it a lower priority than any of the items Seth suggests. Have it to meet the compliance requirements after you’ve already won the job. But, if you’re to stand out from the crowd, it’ll be by doing everything you can to win the job before you have to hand over a resume.

It used to be that “references available on request” was the last line on the resume, and checking them was a late step in the hiring process. Let’s turn that around. Let’s lead off with a blazingly enthusiastic reference that ends with the postscript, “In addition to the incredible talents I’ve mentioned, I hear Heidi has a good-looking resume.”

del.icio.us Tags: Godin,Seth,Microsoft,resume,jobs,Nevile,Hobson,forimmediaterelease,sethgodin

Talk about superb use of a symbol: Scoble was given a gift of a Webvan pen. He says Paul Lindner “handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype.”

Bravo.

I was deep into launching companies when the bubble burst in 2000. There were some voices then calling it a bubble, but not very many, and most of them outside the dotcom mainstream.

This time around it’s different. People who have played key roles in making Web 2.0 happen are sounding notes of caution. Like Scoble and Steve Rubel. It’s a healthy thing.

I’ve been a little acid toward those who first started throwing around the term Kool-Aid as applied to social media. But now, with the coupling of shaky business models and astronomical valuations, what’s being called Kool-Aid isn’t social media or its evangelism, but such truly scary stuff as the last bubble was made on.

But back to communications, which is what this blog is about (even if I sometimes forget). The Webvan pen is such a potent symbol I’m going to ask Scoble to get a really good still shot of it. Then we can all post it over our monitors and on our blogs. To remind us not only to look beyond today’s hype. But also as a reminder of what makes for a powerful message.