Alpha Mind Blog

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.

Over the life of this blog, I’ll frequently mention lessons I’ve learned from the Religious Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers.

Friends have some very peculiar ways, among them their group decision-making process. Just to begin collecting my thoughts about what this way has to teach leaders, I’m posting a short essay on the subject by an insider, a prominent Friend of Philadelphia.

This article, “When Friends Attend to Business,” is a good place to begin learning about Quaker decision-making. The place to go deep-deep is Michael Sheeran’s book Beyond Majority Rule. Although the book is out of print, abebooks.com usually lists a few copies.

A subject I’ll need to take up in an essay is how Quaker process differs from secular forms of “consensus decision-making.” The differences are subtle, and even in Quaker meetings they sometimes disappear. But they’re important, and I’ll explain them as I develop essays on social organisms.

One note here, though: what the two decision-making processes have in common is that, when they are used well, they allow the best listeners to have enhanced influence.