Context & Continuity

Crying Wolf...

This morning, I had the pleasure of listening to one of my many favorite radio shows, Forum, on KQED-fm. The host of the show, Michael Krasny, was away and I can't recall who was sitting in for him but that's not the point. The guests today were John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and co-author of "The Death and Life of American Journalism " and Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is other half of the co-authoring team.

Here's to the segment.

As an engaged, professional witness to the mass slaughter of media and unsettling effects it has on some of the people I most admire, the topic interested me and during the interview, the authors repeatedly made the point that there is a four to one ratio of public relations people to journalists and the authors used this fact to leverage their point that journalism in the United States has a knife at its throat.

Excuse me, but as someone who attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism and practices and performs the Dark Arts of public relations for far too many years, I have come to know many journalists and many public relations .... people. So I was not impressed by this cited fact. In fact, it made me giggle when I thought "I wouldn't break a sweat until the ratio is something on the order of twenty to one." And I started to think about creating a series of jokes along the lines of "How many public relations people does it take to write a press release..."

Now, at this juncture, it is important for me to point out that I am not damning the entire population of my profession because I have met many very intelligent and creative and wonderful individuals along the winding way of my career and I treasure their friendship and they know who they are. Instead, I'm just pointing out that there is no one in my profession who deserves to be celebrated and honored such as I.F. Stone, R.W. Apple, Hunter S. Thompson, Morely Safer, Amy Goodman, Bob Woodward and the thousands of unknown scribes who cover car wrecks and write the words set in agate type on the sports page.

And it would behoove you to listen to the aforementioned interview as the authors express their astonishment that is was completely SRO @ Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. One might think that the crowd suddenly appeared out of thin air instead of the work of some public relations person.

Please. Spare me.

I have a shaky confidence in the American people and their olfactory ability to sniff out bullshit even when it's served to them on the fine china of corporate.america. I have mixed opinions about this week's decision of our Supreme Court that corporate.america has the same right to speak as any individual. On the one hand, I believe that corporate.america has the right to pay me huge amounts of money to better express its point-of-view. On the other hand, my previously stated shaky confidence in the American people's ability to tease out the fact from fiction and opinion is exactly that, shaky. Afterall, this is the same public that eats up heaping helpings of entertainments that should surely insult our so-called intelligence. Perhaps the pursuit of Unobtanium in Avatar is a wake up call to us that coporate.america has pegged us as suckers. Money ≠ Speech.

Perhaps we will never get our fill of lurid and debased entertainments that do their level best to undermine our self-respect and civilization. As for me, I will remain optimistic about the uncontrollable internet as a medium so vast that is has room for perfectly positive expressions of our humanity, the Better Angels. In Elizabethan England, the choice of entertainments were bear-baiting and Shakespeare. And Jane Austen's day, the novel was still looked down and many Well-Respected people disparaged it as a waste of time and energy. From that point of view, the internet would make their minds quail, quiver and dissolve.

Perhaps Beckett puts it best: "I can't go on. I must go on." And we can also rely on the trusty, never rusty apothegm, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In the meantime, Amazon has delivered to me The New York Review of Books edition of Edmund Wilson's history, To the Finland Station with a foreword by Louis Menand and I will soldier on.

T/ Best newsstand in San Francisco.

On Friday, November 6, 2009, Fog City News will celebrate its Tenth Anniversary.  On the one hand, Fog City News is a big too fancy and a bit too small to be a truly great newsstand, like Dina news or Universal New in NYC or the Harvard Square Newsstand in Cambridge.  When I was a very young man laboring in the caverns of Manhattan, making and spinnig news, I would run off to Universal News to get the out-of-town newspapers that had printed my stories. 

But we've come here today to commemorate Fog City News.  If you like newsstands.  And if you like chocolate.  And if you're in San Francisco.  Then you need to visit Fog City News.  Fog City News is where I was able to acquire the issue of French Vogue edited by Sofia Copolla.  It is a long narrow room and you can't reach the magazines on the top rack because it is so high.  And as if that wasn't enough, it does have the most exquisite chocolate one can buy. 

Go.  See.  Buy.  Repeat. 

     

If it weren't for the internet, I'd never know about...

A new type of cloud that's been "discovered." 

Isn't that beautiful?

[more]

What I hope you read in this Sunday's newspaper...

Will Books Be Napsterized?, By RANDALL STROSS

On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze, By CHARLES McGRATH

Advantage Google, By  LEWIS HYDE

Just Outside San Francisco, a Wild Coastline, By ANNE LAWRENCE GUYON

Jewish History, Popcorn Included, By A. O. SCOTT

WNYC - Our Lenny

A 13-day Exploration and Celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s Enduring New York Legacy

Some excellent on-demand shows here:  [more]

I would prefer to believe otherwise...

I've heard two different news stories now, news stories about how Michael Jackson's death has prompted the public to empty Amazon's warehouse of anything related to the King of Pop.  And news stories about how  iTunes has recorded a huge rush of downloads. 

I would prefer to think that some public relations person wasn't sitting around and then BAM!  "Hey, I've got an idea..."  But if it wasn't the public relations person, then it was the journalist who was noodling around and the said, "Hey!  I've got an idea..." and then called the public relations person at Amazon or iTunes.  And the public relations person spilled.  I thank my luck stars that's I've stayed mostly clear of that. 

I write "mostly clear" because, in the course of a career in corporate propaganda, stuff happens.  For example, I used to take the very early train to work back in 1999 and I rode a shuttle bus from the train station to the 3Com campus.  As the shuttle bus made the corner, there are four television news vans, fully lite, microwave masts fully extended and I could tell that they were already doing stand ups on the sidewalk in front of one of the Palm buildings.  All the heads in the bus turned to me - I knew everybody and everybody knew me and what I did.  I asked the the bus driver to drop me off and he obliged me. 

So, it's about 6:00a in November and the first thing I do is introduce myself to the the assemblage and find out what the heck was going on.  So they proceed to tell me that an Egyptian airliner had gone down and one of the passengers was an employee @ Palm.  They said they wanted to interview people arriving at work and ask them about the guy, Kurt Schwenk. --Well, that struck me as very inappropriate so I decided to put them in a cage.  I invited them into the Palm cafeteria for fresh coffee and donuts.  Once we got into a keycarded area of the campus, in a room, that would give me a chance to keep them off the street asking random people about some dead guy who they probably didn't even know. 

In 1999, I had Special Powers @ 3Com and a card key that let me in to most everywhere, including the Palm cafeteria.  @ 6:00a the cafeteria was just getting warmed up for the breakfast crowd and the coffee was brewing and the donuts had been delivered.  So far, the plan was working out.  I got everybody to sit at one big table and told them that I was going to find out what was going on so I could help them out. 

At the time, Palm was being led by a 3Com executive who was a placeholder until the Real Guy could be recruited.  He was famous for showing up to work early, and, sure enough, he was at his desk when I dialed up his cellphone.  I gave him a quick sketch of the situation and recommended that he come down, give the four assembled news teams a statement so that we could get them the hell off campus.  And I told him to leave his Palm at his desk because we wouldn't want to see the CEO of Palm doing a product demo in the context of the death of an employee.  He said that made sense, grabbed his jacket and came downstairs with me.  

I acted as emcee and introduced the executive to the assembled journalists and opened the floor for questions.  The executive held up pretty well but I could tell he had no idea who Kurt Schwenk was.  And so forth until one of the reporters asked the CEO if he had a Palm on him that they could take a picture of.  The CEO looked and me and kind of gulped and then produced the latest, greatest Palm device with wireless access which inevitably lead, of course, to a product demo. 

While all this was going on, I had alerted 3Com security that I needed a couple of guys next to me right now.  I started to wind down the conversation and then told everyone that this was done and it was time to move on.  One of the reporters, and I remember this so very clearly, asked me if I could give her a picture of Schwenk.  I was taken back a bit and told her that I didn't have a picture of him.  Then, she asked me to go up to his desk and see if there were any pictures of his family.  By now I was in position and told her that I wasn't going to do it, and I let the security guys know that we were done here and that they should help the four news crews back to their vans and made sure everyone had my business card. 

One hour later, I get a call from that same reporter who had asked about the pictures and she asks me, "Can you send me a picture of him, the one you have on for his badge."  I told her that I wouldn't do it and I recall saying it in a rather sternly inflected voice.  She replied, "Ok, then I'll just go to the DMV and get it from them."  I wished her luck.

I'm no saint.  I decided that I wasn't going to be a journalist as I was covering my third student suicide listen to the telephone ring at the home of his parents so I could ask them how they felt about it.  I knew then and there that my momma didn't raise me for this type of work and looking out into the future, I knew there were going to be a lot more calls like this in my future.  --No.  That was it for me.  And so I ended up in book publishing and one thing led to another.  High tech PR is, generally, a very competitive profession but I don't have to deal with pulling people's lives open and shine a bright light on what I find. 

On 9/11, in addition to everything else, a collegue and I organized a truck full of Wi-Fi gear to be delivered to the Red Cross in Manhattan and told the twenty some odd guys we had based in Manhattan to help install it.  We did it because it was the right thing to do.  And we did get one piece of coverage on that.  But that wasn't why we did it.  My collegue, Karin Bakis, and I lost a dear friend that day and we did it because we could and it was the right thing to do. 

I'm just saying, some PR people at Amazon and iTunes have to figure out what part they're going to play in the story -- or not.  I don't know if anyone took that call at Amazon or iTunes or if the reporters got the information off the websites.  My gut tells me that someone in PR got a call -- and took the call.  I don't have to do that. 

McKinsey & Co.: Pages from Alessi’s Handbook.

I want to call your attention to two things at once.  First, I'm posting about another article from McKinsey's website.  This one is about Alessi, the Italian design / manufacturing company.  According to the article, Alessi has an "0pen" approach to design and works with several different artists / designers such as Michael Graves and Phillip Stark. 

In this interactive feature, a narrated slide show takes you through Alessi’s history of collaborating with designers and the creative approach behind its innovations. Next, a video interview with CEO Alberto Alessi brings you deeper into the development process; Alessi explains how working with constraints can help refine designs. Finally, an interactive graphic lets you navigate through his tool for assessing new designs. This formula, which Alessi developed himself to measure risk and success, is an interesting example of how one company is applying structured measurement to the creative process of innovation.

The article and multimedia presentation is very interesting and highly recommended.  [See it here.]

Here's the second thing I want to call your attention to:  It's my humble opinion that McKinsey could make it a smidgen easier for people to leverage their digital assets.  This article is a case in point.  Of course the reader can find the link nestled under Mr. Alessi's photo that launches the interactive presentation.  Perhaps that could be made more obvious and integral to the article? 

Well, that's what I would do.

The Economist, 2.26.9: Primates on Facebook

Come on, you knew it all along, didn't you.

THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

[more]

Kurt Andersen: Obamaism

This is from Mr. Andersen's wonderful essay on Obama as published in the November 9, 2008 issue of New York magazine.  If nothing else, please read the first four paragraphs:

When we were growing up, the future was the 21st century, and the future was going to astonish us.

And so it has, eight years in, and not just with whiz-bang gadgets. We were astonished by the attacks of September 11. By the administration’s bungling of the Iraq War. By Hurricane Katrina’s scale of destruction and the administration’s incompetent response. By the realization that global warming is possibly out of control. By the teetering of the global financial system.

Yet none of the 21st century’s OMFG events has been any more astonishing than what happened last week. Not just a Democratic president, but one elected with the third largest majority of any Democrat in the past one hundred years; not just a resoundingly victorious Democrat who lacks (for the first time since most voters were born) a southern accent, but who nevertheless won three southern states; not just a big-city northern Democrat whose name recognition was close to zero 1,500 days ago, but an eloquent Ivy League intellectual; and, of course, not just an unknown smooth-talking pointy-headed neoliberal with an exotic upbringing, but, yes, an African-American.

For those of us born since World War II, never in our adult lifetimes (as the next First Lady undoubtedly meant to say last winter) has any single event made us prouder of our country—and for those of us who live in this city, never have we felt more completely in sync with it. We’re all Dorothy, stunned at having just stepped out—tripped out, one might even say—from a half-wrecked black-and-white reality into a strange and glorious new Technicolor world.

Please may I have more...

I tried to resist...

... blogging this bit of brilliance, but have succumbed.   So, in case you haven't read it yet...

So, in case you don't know the back story, Maureen Dowd once "dated" Aaron Sorkin.  Last week, Ms. Dowd asked Mr. Sorkin to write the dialogue between Mr. Barak Obama and President Jed Bartlet.  (Isn't this more than just a little bit like fanfic?)  Read on...

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

[more]

This is getting freakish

Just received another email from Hillary and it sets my mind to work trying to remember why my relationship with Hillary is beginning to feel so familiar.  And then it all comes back...

The summer between my sophomore and junior year.  I'm going to summer school, as usual because who really wants to spend the summer at home in Arkansas.  I've got a good part-time tutoring gig with the athletic department, a stool at the local bar and a cue behind the counter at the pool hall.  I'm taking some graduate level English classes and living off campus in a wonderful derelict house across the street from the food co-op.  Life is good.

I spot someone in one of my classes and she's very quiet and very cute and I like that type.  One thing leads to another and we go out to see Heaven's Gate and then have a cocktail and it becomes very clear very quickly that she's as crazy as a loon -- and this is a permanent condition and not just a bad reaction to Michael Cimino's movie masterpiece.  A year earlier, insanity wouldn't have dissuaded me or dampened my affections.  There were periods of my life when I thought madness was kind of charming, but by this stage in my life I've come to grips with the fact that it is Very Unproductive so at the end of our evening together I've decided it's been an ok evening (I liked the movie) and our lives would continue headed in different directions.

Except they didn't. 

Of course she was in one of my classes so I couldn't exactly avoid her especially when she decided to sit next to me.  Then there were the casual invitations to head over to Bradey Commons after class to enjoy the air conditioning and study together and that seemed rather innocent, but I could tell that, through her madness, she didn't see it that way and I could feel myself being inexorably pulled ever deeper into her vortex.  --But we never went out on another date, I swear. 

She started popping by the house after shopping at the co-op.  Then, she started appearing there empty-handed of an excuse altogether.  I did the right thing and told her that we really weren't "seeing" each other and she seemed surprised by that.  She didn't take it well.  Neither did her room mate, who called me up to let me know this.  Neither did her mother back in Maryland.

So, now I'm still getting these emails from Hillary and from Maggie Williams and from Chelsea and I want to tell them, "Look:  we're just friends, ok?  I need some space to breathe."

Sometimes, late at night, I wake up convinced I've heard someone in the driveway and I picture her, after the bar's closed with a stomach full of bitterness.  She's standing in my front yard staring up at my window, thinking about how I'm probably going to vote for Obama and feeling fury rising in her throat. 

I never should have shown any interest, but it's too late now.

Things I Like...

Music.  Doesn't everyone?  I've survivied the roller coaster rides of different formats and has been fairly successful getting what I really want into a digital format that's almost convenient.  There have been hard disk failures, some dead end streets, and etc., but, overall, I'm doing ok. 

What I've come to praise today is a service that does what it's promises and promises something that you might want.

MP3Tunes makes a simple proposition and does a lot of heavy lifting in the background.  Install a little app next to your music files and open an account.  The app will automatically copy all of your music up to MP3Tuness server for safe keeping.  But, while your files are there, would you like them cleaned and washed, retagged, re-collated into the correct album play order, re-titlte with the right title, etc.  Very nice feature.  Then, of course, all those fixes become synched to your local files. 

Perhaps your in your office and you don'thave your iPod or the particular album you have a yen to hear isn't synched to your iPod.  No problem.  Log on to MP3Tunes and open up it's player (which is a dead ringer for iTunes), find your tracks and rock on. 

Maybe you want to have your music files at work as well as at home.  No problem.  Install the little app leave it on over the weekend and , voila.  All your music is there on Monday morning. 

I'm very happy with the service and highly recommend it. 

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

I've always been a radio person. 

When I was growing up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and my parents put me to bed, they would turn on a small radio by my head.  During the season, the station joined the St. Louis Cardinal's baseball network, at one time the largest radio network in the U.S.   Stan Musial and Bob Gibson played then and no one else was more important in the entire world.  Off season, the station played bingo as sponsored by the local Piggly Wiggly and I fell to sleep hypnotized by the announcer saying, "B-2 ... B-2.  Remember folks, Piggly Wiggly has a special this week on pork loin and you shouldn't miss out.  B-2.  ..." 

As an undergraduate, I was finally exposed to NPR and a Pacific station and if you don't know what Pacifica is you should look it up because it's something special.  Susan Stamberg was the smartest, nicest person you could ever want to meet and Bob Edwards helped start a show called Morning Edition.  My dear friend Stu Hackel had a program on KOPN, the Pacific station, and it was called The Fox's Minstral show and on hot summer nights I would hang out with him and we'd open the windows and Stu would play any song he wanted to. 

In New York City, there was both a Pacifica and NPR affiliate, of course, and the most beautiful girl in Brooklyn introduced me to WOR, and WEVD.  (And if you can tell me which presidential candidate's initials created the call letters for WEVD I'll buy you a cup of coffee.)  We listened to Lynn Samuels, Paul Gorman, Simon Loekle, David Garland, Delphine Blue, Amy Goodman, Bob Fass, Citizen Kafka, Larry Josephson, David Rothenberg, Peter Bochan, Steve Post, Jonathan Schwartz, John Schaefer and many, many more.  We also listened to WBGO, especially Michael Bourne.

In San Francisco, we listen to KCSM, KQED and we're lucky enough to just pull in KXPR and KXJZ out of Sacramento.   

And that was a very long introduction to the topic at hand.

It would be completely remiss of me...

... not to mention that today, Glenn Gould would have turned seventy-five had time and the tides carried him more gently along the way.  One of the several pieces of media today that remember Mr. Gould includes this one from the Public Radio International Program, The World.  If one scolls to the bottom of the page, there will be the link to the audio clip about a new, posthumous recording of the Goldberg Variations.  The producer of the album believes that Mr. Gould would have excised his sining from the recording had he but the means.  --I don't believe that for a second.  He was a brilliant sonic engineer and performer.  Were his vocalizations anything but deliberate, they would have been excised and never heard instead of a voice that now echoes through time.

Bach: The Goldberg Variations 1955 Performance: Zenph Re-performance

Everything under the sun is in tune

I indulged myself and, as i was paying bills, watched a television documentary from a series called Classic Album that originally aired on VH-1.  This particular installment was on Dark Side of the Moon.

First, it is difficult for me to fathom that this music is more than thirty years old.  But what really grabbed me is a comment made by David Gilmour.   Near the end of the documentary, he said that he really wished he had an opportunity to hear the album straight through for the first time.   And it struck me that this was so sad a thing.   He had never heard the album the way almost everyone else in the world had heard it.  He built it, take-by-take, song-by-song. 

Imagine that. It strikes me as something almost quantum:  "I can't see it because I created it."

The New Yorker, 5/7/7: Shouts & Murmurs

What I Am

by Ian Frazier, May 7, 2007

One of my jobs around the house is to load and run the dishwasher. I believe I do this job very successfully. The other day, I loaded both racks, top and bottom, according to a special method that I have. Then I turned the machine on. As a result of some mishap, during the wash cycle a number of the dishes were broken, including a serving dish with a pattern of leaves and olives which my wife had particularly liked. While unloading the dishwasher, she discovered the breakage, and she brought the pieces of the dish to show me. I expressed sympathy and then began to describe my method of dishwasher loading. This did not make much headway with her, because she disagrees with my method and in fact has asked me several times not to use it. I kept trying to explain, and in the course of the discussion just for a second she lost control and said something hurtful and unkind. I will not go into details, except to say that she referred to me as an “idiot” (quotation marks mine).

O.K.; point taken. Based on some of the things I do and their consequences, her characterization of me is not inaccurate, as far as it goes. What I object to isn’t so much that as the terminology employed. Quite simply, “idiot” is not a nice word to call somebody, and I find myself asking, as Mr. Welch did of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Throughout my life, I have had to struggle to keep from thinking of myself in the limiting way that word implies. So, for the record, I would like it known that I am not an “idiot.” I am a person who suffers from idiocy. Nobody knows what it is like to deal with crippling bouts of idiocy while trying to lead a normal life. The last thing I need is for somebody to make it harder by pointing out what an “idiot” I am. [more]

ZBS: Steer With Your Ears

The summer of 19..., well, it was long ago and far away.  I was living in Astoria, Queens and on Friday nights on WNYC there appeared a radio serial, Moon Over Morocco produced by ZBS.  It became deeply imprinted on my head.  So I did some research and learned that this was one of several different radio productions from ZBS and that it has a long and illustrious history as a recording facility in Fort Edward, NY. 

The first, and most important thing about ZBS productions is how well written they are.  The second thing to notice is how well-produced they are.  Using a technique called binarual recording, they are able to capture and create sounds that are some of the most amazing things you'll ever hear. 

After listening to many different productions, my favorite is still Moon Over Morocco and highly recommend it.  It tells the story of Jack Flanders, a recurring character across many different shows under the title, Travels With Jack.  In the case of Moon Over Morocco, ZBS also incorporates sounds recorded by Paul Bowles.

Recently, I had a wonderful experience.  Just to see what would happen, I played the opening of Moon Over Morocco for my nine-year-old, a very opinionated young lady.  And she fell headlong in love with it and couldn't listen to it fast enough.  And I always hear something new every time I listen.  Recently, ZBS announced it is releasing Moon Over Morocco in its original radio format, fifty episodes, and is even making it available for free download before offering on CD. 

And it wouldn't be fair for me to conclude this post without attributing the source of the title, Steer with you ears."  This is from another master of audio production, Ken Nordine, who produced a series of programs called Word Jazz.  Mr. Nordine is due many kudos too.

The McKinsey Quarterly: The CEO's role in leading transformation

The McKinsey Quarterly offers a free email subscription and access to a few, select articles.  Free.  Great value.  Its latest update includes an article entitled The CEO's Role in Leading Transformation.  Here's the sub-head: "The CEO helps a transformation succeed by communicating its significance, modeling the desired changes, building a strong top team, and getting personally involved."  Highly recommended. 

Although the article doesn't go into tremendous detail about the "communication" aspect of leading transformation, but of course it's interesting  to me that it leads with this.  The article also includes this: "Sharing success stories helps crystallize the meaning of the transformation and gives people confidence that it will actually work." 

A lot of the work I've focused on during the past ten years has focused on "executive communications" and, truth is, it has steadily become the most demanded service I offer.   So, a friend of mine recently called me up and  to quiz me on executive communications -- and I was quite pleased I passed the test.  The gist of the quiz is based on Moses and his brother, Aaron.  When asked to lead the Jews, Moses tells God that he might not be up to the challenge as he doesn't speak well.  "Lord, open my breast, and do Thou ease for me my task, Unloose the knot upon my tongue, that they may understand my words."   Midrash says that Aaron's role was to help the people understand Moses.

Anyway, I encourage you to enroll for the free emails from McKinsey and, to help you see the value, I'm gifting you the free .pdf that was distributed to members this week. 

Download the .pdf of The CEO's Role in Leading Transformation

This is not a political post

In today's media, Vice President Dick Cheney is quoted as saying, ''a policy of retreat.''  His audience was an aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier at Yokosuka Navy Base near Tokyo.  I'm sure he received a very enthusiastic reception.  --Let's not review the politics, just the rhetoric because this administration seems to have an issue keeping some essential points of rhetoric straight. 

We'll establish the starting point for this as the administration's "war on terror."  Media starlets ranging from Jon Stewart to Maureen Dowd have criticized the administration for mixing up the concepts of strategies and tactics.  Terror is a tactic.  War is a strategy.  Nation building is a strategy.  More democracy is a goal.  Better health care is a goal.  --This is not an easy rhetorical framework to manage.  I've written many public relations plans and learned how to do this from a master of the art and craft.  Most public relations plans are structured under sub-heads like "objectives," "strategies," "tactics" and "measurement." 

But back to today's example:  Cheney's rhetoric is that  retreat is a policy.  I believe that retreat is a tactic and would prefer to leave the tactics of how to win a war to the Pentagon and other military experts.  If I were in a battle and the officer in charge said it was time to retreat, I would absolutely believe and trust him (or her).  So, rhetorically speaking, Cheney believes these military tactics are actually elements of policy and does anyone really care? 

Well, I do, obviously.  I believe language is sacred, literally.  In the political and business realms, language is not all but it plays an important and vital role.  And when --  either by accident or design -- our rhetoric is sloppy, then we can't expect much in return.  In Cheney's case, history will assay the results in the kiln of time.  In the meantime, I will leave you, gentle reader, with a quote from the 1985 NYTimes obituary of Robert Fitzgerald, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.who translated many of the classics of the Western Canon.  I've carried this with me for more than twenty years now.  It's something Fitzgerald wrote for the fiftieth anniversary report of the Harvard class of 1933:   

So hard at best is the lot of man, and so great is the beauty he can apprehend, that only a religious conception of things can take in the extremes and meet the case.  Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails.  But is seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto:  love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art.   

There are reasons for me to believe that the current administration either doesn't, or can't, appreciate Fitzgerald's framework.

As it has been...

This has been a repository of media coverage and other articles of my work.  As I've turned in this made-up career, I'm receiving encouragement from friends to post here more frequently on issues pertaining to public relations and not just the work of my own hands. 

I have a mental list of Important Thing's I've Learned and one is about opinions.  The setting for this lesson was after a couple of beers in the hallway of a dormitory at the University of  Missouri and my teacher was a peer, Rob Horn (aka "Tooter").  The lesson was based on a riddle.  Why are opinions like (a certain anatomical part)?  Because everyone has one and they all smell bad.  And I've carried that lesson close to me for several years now and it's influenced what I've posted here perhaps too much.  So, now you can expect to see more opinion and commentary here, for better or worse. 

And I would deeply appreciate any guidance you have to offer me. 

Worlds of Awe...

...Try it.  You might like it.

NYTimes, 3/21/04: Thomas Friedman: Software of Democracy

Op-Ed Columnist: Software of Democracy

"...you can't have a successful IT industry when every company has to build its own infrastructure. America's greatest competitive advantages are the flexibility of its economy and the quality of its infrastructure, rule of law and regulatory institutions. Knowledge workers are mobile and they like to live in nice, stable places. My hope is that the knowledge workers now spearheading India's economic revolution will feel compelled to spearhead a political revolution."

The New York Times, 2/3/04: Making a Relaxed, Low-Key Film in Madcap Tokyo

[snip]

Last week Ms. Coppola, 32, said that she didn't feel like doing a director's commentary. "Translation" is her second feature film, after "The Virgin Suicides" (1999). "I thought that maybe when I'm an older lady, I can talk about my work," she said. "Right now I'm kind of self-conscious."

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The New York Times, 1/31/04: A New York Magazine Columnist Moves On

...

Mr. Wolff, who has generated a great deal of controversy and attention with his acid-etched portraits of media moguls since joining New York in 1998, will write eight columns a year for Vanity Fair on the media industry and will also produce three long feature articles, according to Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter. "I have read his work over the years and I have always thought he was a gifted writer," Mr. Carter said. "I like the way his mind works."

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The New York Times, 12/14/03: The Year in Ideas

It's taken me a couple of days to digest this, the annual inventory of The Things You Should Know. For me, this is Received Word about what's in and out, equal to the late lamented W In/Out issue. So, in case you haven't made the pilgramage, then do so now.

From the introduction:

Each December, The New York Times Magazine looks back at the year through an unusual lens: ideas. We send out a team of researchers and reporters to investigate the latest thinking in every subject imaginable -- not just war, medicine and politics but also cosmetics, literary theory and Wiffle-ball technology -- and to bring back the most innovative, intriguing, mystifying and promising ideas they can find. Then we boil that vast intellectual stew down to the issue you hold in your hands: an alphabetical encyclopedia of the 67 inventions, breakthroughs and theories (big and small, nice and nasty) that made a difference in 2003.

Although the predictable big thinkers are represented here -- Paul Wolfowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editors of US Weekly -- an unusual proportion of this year's crop of ideas comes from lone-wolf thinkers of one stripe or another: basement tinkerers, armchair philosophers, mad scientists.

Take Michael Kennedy, a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, whose big idea this year (G.I. Bill for College Athletes) had absolutely nothing to do with geography but might offer a solution to the conundrum of big-money college athletics. Or consider Frank Polifka, a Kansas wheat farmer, who invented an industrial garbage disposal that works like a contained cyclone (Tornado in a Can). It functions brilliantly, pulverizing waste of all kinds into a fine dust -- but no one (Polifka included) can figure out why. And then there is David Stevenson, a professor at Caltech, who in May came up with a real-life plan to accomplish a longtime dream of science fiction writers and 10-year-olds everywhere: drilling straight down to the center of the earth (The Jules Verne Project).

This issue, then, is not just a compilation of the year's most significant and thought-provoking ideas. It's also a salute to the schemers, oddballs and other unorthodox geniuses toiling away in their labs and libraries, bent on changing the world armed with nothing but a brand-new big idea.
[more] <--Link will age quickly.

Douglas Rushkoff, 11/22/03: Danny Pearl Book

{snip}
We are not passive recipients of law and truth, but active creators of ethical systems and models for the Divine. We are not believers, or even doubters, but wrestlers. Israel, more than a nation-state, is this very confrontation with the Divine. The wrestling is our continuity.
{/snip}
[All of The Essay]

The New York Times, 11/16/03

"War, what's it good for..."

The New Yorker, 11/17/03: Questions for President Bush's Next Press Conference

by CALVIN TRILLIN
Issue of 2003-11-17
Posted 2003-11-10

Friendly question: “Sir, although your supporters’ predictions that Iraqis would greet our troops with flowers haven’t been borne out, isn’t it possible that, given the problems with the water supply and the infrastructure in general, there is a serious shortage of flowers over there and that Iraqis might be greeting our troops with flowers if Iraqis had any flowers?”

Follow-up question to friendly question: “Mr. President, in your budget for the reconstruction of Iraq, is there any money specifically earmarked for rebuilding the Iraqi cut-flower industry, and, if so, would any American company be able to bid on that contract, or would they have to go through your friend Joe Allbaugh’s consulting firm?”

Zen question: “Sir, if the ability of the Star Wars ABMs to hit a nuclear missile is imaginary and the nuclear missiles in Iraq are imaginary, does that mean a Star Wars ABM could hit an Iraqi nuclear missile?”

Follow-up question to Zen question if answer is yes:“How could that be verified?”

etc.
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This link will quickly age.

The New York Review of Books, 10/23/03: Israel: The Alternative

Israel: The Alternative

By Tony Judt

The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.

But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

[snip]

[/snip]

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.

A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.

[more]

The New York Observer, 10/27/03

Queer Eye, My Eye! Cast Harasses Hairy Heteros
by Simon Doonan

Highly strung homosexuals have got to be stopped! They are terrorizing the mainstream males of Manhattan. The Queer Eye phenomenon has given carte blanche to every boutique salesperson, hairdresser and style guru—call them the lay gay—to "transform" any dopey hetero who happens to wander into their field of vision. The more these wannabes inflict their style makeovers on all the Slob, Dick and Harrys, the more they flatten the landscape of masculine attire into a homogenous pancake. QE’s Carson Kressley et al. seem hell-bent on making everyone dress like … Carson Kressley—i.e., faded low-rise boot-cut jeans, vintage leather jacket, white shirt, wingtips sans socks à la Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Our tribal diversity—such an important part of bloke culture—is in jeopardy.
{snip}
{/snip}
Re Tattoos (or permanent bell-bottoms, as a friend calls them): Let’s face it, they are a desperate, pathetic and transparent attempt by middle-class people to acquire some bad-ass grit. They look ridiculous! Stop it!

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