Alpha Mind Blog

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.”

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.

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.

After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.

So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.

The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.

It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.

Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.

Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:

First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.

Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.

Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.

Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.

Because groups really can’t think.

And yet they must.

And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.

I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.

I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.

I hope for feedback.

And I hope you enjoy the book.

Last week I thought it was only a joke when I read a blog post saying that the NFL might forbid people having “Super Bowl parties” because of trademark infringement.

But now this, from the Des Moines Register .

Apple wants the Lift, a Des Moines downtown bar, to stop using the name “iPod Monday” to describe a weekly event in which patrons share their musical tastes via their iPods.

“Please choose a name for your product that is consistent with Apple’s guidelines (that does not include iPod or any other Apple trademark or variation thereon),” reads a letter from Apple representative Pete Alcorn to Curtis. The e-mail refers to the event’s Web site, ipodmonday.com, and related podcasts and online broadcasts.

My first tempation: to say “Gee, do I need to comment on how stupid this is?”

But on second thought, it’s a perfect follow-on to my last post.

Apple is a very smart company. As Paul Graham points out, though, smart is not wise. This isn’t stupid, it’s just far from wise.

Smart says: if someone uses our trademark, we go after them.

Wise says: we do what’s in our interest. What’s in our interest is to encourage people to spread our trademark for us.

Wise, had it been present at Apple, would also have said, “It’s not in our interest to be perceived as badly as this will cause us to be.”

P.S. Legal departments in big companies are there to keep other departments from making very costly mistakes. But who’s watching over the legals?

So you don’t manage software engineering projects. Then should you read Jerry Weinberg’s Overstructured management of software engineering?

Absolutely. Positively.

If you write, read it. Weinberg is a model of lucid and engaging writing.

If you manage organizations of any kind, read it. Weinberg understands what you face. (Weinberg is writing about “overstructuring” errors which software managers are especially prone to because they were once programmers. But they are errors one sees in every kind of organization.)

If you simply like seeing a true alpha mind at work, read it and anything else by Weinberg.

I took a course in software development management at MIT Sloan, and this article was one of my favorite pieces of reading for that course. Although it’s probably been online for eons, I’m delighted to have found it, and happy to share it with you.