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She doesn't answer the phone

2012-02-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

In 1951, E. B. White — the novelist responsible for, most notably, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little — was accused by the ASPCA of not paying his dog tax and, as a result, "harboring" an unlicensed dog. He responded by way of the following delightful letter.

(Source: Letters of a Nation; Image: E. B. White with his dachshund, Minnie, via Mister Crew.)

12 April 1951

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
York Avenue and East 92nd Street
New York, 28, NY

Dear Sirs:

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by "harboring" you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie's blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don't get her a sweater instead. That's a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn't like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn't get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven't had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.

In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more commonly called an "unspaded" bitch. She wears her metal license tag but I must say I don't particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine is always thinking of something. Maine puts up roadside crosses along the highways to mark the spots where people have lost their lives in motor accidents, so the highways are beginning to take on the appearance of a cemetery, and motoring in Maine has become a solemn experience, when one thinks mostly about death. I was driving along a road near Kittery the other day thinking about death and all of a sudden I heard the spring peepers. That changed me right away and I suddenly thought about life. It was the nicest feeling.

You asked about Minnie's name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn't answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can't reach it, but she wouldn't answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can't think of anything offhand that he wasn't interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life — that is, he loved life if by "life" you mean "trouble," and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days. She's almost twelve. I guess I've already mentioned that. I got her from Dr. Clarence Little in 1939. He was using dachshunds in his cancer-research experiments (that was before Winchell was running the thing) and he had a couple of extra puppies, so I wheedled Minnie out of him. She later had puppies by her own father, at Dr. Little's request. What do you think about that for a scandal? I know what Fred thought about it. He was some put out.

Sincerely yours,

E. B. White

If You Were Going to Die Today, What Would You Regret Most (and How Would You Change for the Better)?

2012-02-07T15:37:00.000-08:00

If you've lived you've made mistakes, and that likely means you've accumulated a few regrets along the way. How damaging would those regrets be if your life was about to end? What would you wish you'd have done differently? Susie Steiner, writing for The Guardian, reports on the most common regrets of the dying and they're mostly things that could've been easily remedied. Do your regrets coincide?

Here are the top five:

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Do you share any of those regrets? Do you have others? Most importantly, what would you do to change things before it's too late? Often times this is easier said than done, and the process can be long and involve many unknowns, but chances are at least a few of you have preemptively avoided these regrets and can share your experiences with others. If you've got advice, share it in the comments.

Photo by LeventeGyori (Shutterstock).

Top five regrets of the dying | The Guardian via Swissmiss

Contact Adam Dachis:

19 Web Sites for Travel Savings in 2012

2012-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

HIGHER hotel prices, airline capacity cuts and rising travel demand mean travelers will have to work harder to find a good deal in 2012. But there are plenty of online tools to help keep your vacation expenses in check. Here are 19 go-to Web sites to help you save money this year.

Enlarge This Image

FLIGHTS

Looking for sales on a specific route, or just want to go somewhere cheap?AirfareWatchdog.com hunts down deals computers tend to miss, like promo codes airlines include in e-mail newsletters. It also finds sales from Allegiant and Southwest, which typically aren’t listed on major airfare search engines. You can sign up for specific fare alerts or a list of all the cheap round-trip fares from your local airport.

Where can you go for $500 or less? Kayak.com/explore will show you where you can vacation for a particular price and display the results on a map. You can narrow your search by month, region, flight length, weather or activity. Clicking on a price reveals dates the fare is available.

If you already know where you want to go, use Itasoftware.com to find the cheapest dates to fly. Click on “airfare search” in the middle of the home page, then enter your departure date and destination and select “see calendar of lowest fares.” To purchase, you must go to the airline’s Web site or online agencies like Travelocity.

To figure out whether to buy that plane ticket now or wait, go to Bing.com/travel. Its Price Predictor can determine how likely a fare is to rise or fall during the next seven days from more than 250 cities in the United States to top domestic destinations and major hubs in Europe. The site claims that its predictions are about 75 percent accurate and save customers more than $50 on average for a round trip.

After you’ve booked your tickets at an airline site, enter your flight information atYapta.com to track the price so you don’t miss out on savings if the price drops. If the difference in price exceeds the rebooking fee (typically $75 to $150), Yapta will send you, without charge, an e-mail or tweet so you can call the airline to claim the credit.

HOTELS

To get the best deal on Priceline.com, where travelers name their own price and pay before learning the hotel’s name, sites like Biddingfortravel.com andBetterbidding.com have long offered strategic advice on how to game the system. Now, a new site, Biddingtraveler.com, goes a step further. Enter the city, dates, neighborhood and star ratings for the hotel you want. Then, after reviewing the site’s recommendations, enter a “lowball” bid and “final offer.” The Bidding Traveler then calculates and helps you execute the optimal bidding strategy on Priceline.

Not willing to gamble? Hotels.com offers nearly 145,000 properties in more than 60 countries from national chain hotels and all-inclusive resorts to bed-and-breakfasts. You can find particularly good last-minute deals on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the site has a loyalty program through which members earn a free-night voucher after they book 10 nights.

For hotel fanciers, Luxurylink.com, offers discounts on high-end hotels and villas through online auctions and deals. Just last month the site was auctioning off a five-night package at La Samanna on St. Martin in the Caribbean that included a deluxe ocean-view room with a private terrace, airport transfers, a bottle of rum upon arrival, two 45-minute massages and a one-day car rental with a minimum starting bid of $2,475. The package normally costs $6,171.

VACATION RENTALS

As hotel prices rise, vacation rentals can be the better deal. HomeAway.com offers more than 290,000 listings in 145 countries, including rentals by owners that cut out the middleman.

Airbnb.com connects travelers with locals who are offering a place to stay, whether it is a couch, a private apartment or a castle. It currently has about 100,000 listings in 19,000 cities and towns in 192 countries, and charges booking fees from 6 to 12 percent.Wimdu.com offers a similar service focused mostly on places in Europe with 35,000 listings across 100 countries. Do as much due diligence as you can when using such sites; some hosts have been known to cancel confirmed reservations at the last minute.

For luxury seekers, Jetsetter.com/homes, a members-only site, offers discounts of up to 50 percent on 5 to 10 carefully selected vacation rentals. Membership is free and by invitation only. You can also request a free membership on Jetsetter.com.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Tired of sifting through daily-deal or group-shopping sites like Groupon and LivingSocial for local bargains? YipIt.com, collects those deals from 787 services in 118 North American cities. Travelers who sign up with an e-mail can filter results by checking categories like wine tasting, museum, golf or other activities. A recent search for restaurant and spa deals in New York turned up a $60 three-course dinner for two with wine (worth $136) at Tenpenny, the Gotham Hotel’s restaurant, and a $199 Moroccan Spa treatment at the Trump SoHo, worth $339. Pay close attention to expiration dates to be sure the deals will be good for your travel plans.

Autoslash.com searches the Web for discount coupons on car rentals and applies them after you book. It then continually checks for lower rates and coupons until your trip date and automatically applies any discounts it finds.

Cayole.com lets you search cruises by price, destination, room type or cruise line, then offers price predictions to give cruisers an idea of whether they should buy now or wait for a possible price drop. For example, by clicking “get more details” for a five-night Western Mediterranean cruise in September, the site recommended that travelers booking balcony cabins buy “as soon as possible, because prices are likely to increase.” For interior ocean-view rooms or suites it suggested waiting.

If you’re willing to swap places with a stranger, list your home and find travelers willing to trade on Homeexchange.com, which facilitates about 60,000 swaps a year. Recent listings included a two-bedroom apartment on Lake Como in Italy and a six-bedroom oceanfront lodge in Cape Town with a resident game ranger. Members pay $119.40 to list their home for a year or $47.85 for three months.

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

Does 'Devil Inside' suggest a new studio-filmmaker relationship?

2012-01-09T11:50:00.001-08:00

Say what you will about "The Devil Inside" -- and judging by its "F" CinemaScore, plenty of people did -- but however harsh the words, the movie is an unusual phenomenon. Hidden beneath the box-office puns and the industry euphemisms is something rare: an out-of-nowhere, did-that-really-just-happen, Tim Tebow-style success.

Films can quietly build word of mouth, especially in the genre community. But not like this.

"Devil," an exorcism tale that an obscure filmmaker named William Brent Bell made on a shoestring before a pair of Hollywood producers helped him sell it to Paramount, featured no stars. Nor did it boast any festival-enabled grass-roots support a la "Saw" or "Paranormal Activity." And critics? Forget about them. They gave the film -- which uses the shopworn "Blair Witch"-like found-footage conceit to tell of a woman who travels to Italy to explore the mystery of her murderous and possessed mother -- a 7% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet the film attracted a constituent base that would make any Republican nominee envious. So robust was its audience, in fact, that "Devil" not only won the weekend with an eye-popping $34.5 million -- it became the third-biggest January opening in history.

That would have been an astonishing feat even if the movie hadn't been so vehemently disliked; as it was, the numbers were even more impressive. (By comparison, the 2009 Cameron Diaz thriller "The Box," the last wide release to be given the scarlet "F" by CinemaScore respondents, opened only to $7.5 million.)

The "Devil" base was not only strong, it was hidden -- so much so that pre-release projections underestimated the total audience by as much as half.

Pundits have understandably been struggling to make sense of it all. No matter what explanation one settles on, it's clear that the marketing team at Paramount, which retailed the movie from its low-budget Insurge division, pulled off some nifty tricks.

A haunting image of a nun whose eyes lacked pupils was pretty much unavoidable to
anyone who stepped outside in recent weeks. So was an enticingly simple, if dubious, message that this was one of the scariest movies you'll ever see.

And the Twitter volume coming into the weekend was both a reason for and a symptom of pre-release interest. (Paramount deployed social media in a number of ways, including with a clever "Tweet Your Scream" promotion that it also used for "Paranormal Activity 3.")

But in pulling off its box-office coup, the team behind "Devil" did something else besides just persuade a lot of people to see a derivative movie: They departed from the typical micro-budget success story. Those successes, after all, usually involve a strong or novel film -- as the trope these days goes, anyone with a camera, editing software and a story to tell can make a good movie. The question is whether they can find an audience.

But "The Devil Inside" did things backward. The people with a camera and editing software made a movie that wasn't very good, judging by both populist and critical responses. Yet the movie found a huge audience.

There's an interesting, even daring, model tucked away in all this. For decades, studios have sought to discover filmmakers in unlikely places -- shorts, low-budget features -- and then make them part of the system. They pluck these people from their marginal work and put them to work on mainstream movies already in their pipeline.

"Devil" suggests something different and a lot more decentralized, in which a studio simply acquires the low-budget movie and goes to work marketing it. The filmmaker feels like he or she won the lottery. And the studio pulls in cash while taking very little risk, instead just inexpensively tapping in to the thousands of film-school grads who want access to that distribution system.

Of course, some of this has been attempted before, particularly at Paramount, which turned the first "Paranormal" into a major hit in a similar way. But "Devil" offers a new twist. "Paranormal" showed that a studio could find a gem of a movie, acquire it, and bring people in to see it. "Devil" shows a studio can get people to see a movie even when they really don't want to.

RELATED:

Movie review: "The Devil Inside"

Moviegoers are possessed by "The Devil inside"

--Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: A scene from "The Devil Inside." Credit: Paramount Pictures

Hobbits, aliens, Batman and more: Which is the most anticipated movie of 2012?

2012-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

From left: 'Brave,' 'The Dark Knight Rises,' 'Prometheus,' 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' (Pixar/Disney, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, MGM)

All the gifts are finally unwrapped and the cinematic class of 2011 has finally been presented. There’s not much left to do now but watch as the clock counts down until 2012.

It should be a quiet time to backtrack and catch up on all those movies that went unviewed opening weekend, but are now present on nearly every critics’ top 10 list. But the studios have kick-started the anticipation for the new year with a herd of new trailers for some of 2012′s biggest potential blockbusters — three in the last week alone.

Holiday moviegoers (or anyone with a decent Internet connection) got their first peeks at “The Hobbit,” “Prometheus” and an extended look at “The Dark Knight Rises.” These trailers joined the already-released group, which includes “The Avengers” and “John Carter” and “The Hunger Games,” among others.

So what big, expensive, effects-laden 2012 movie are you most anticipating? Review the trailers below and then cast your vote in the poll.

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

“Prometheus”

“The Dark Knight Rises”

“The Amazing Spider-Man”

“The Avengers”

“John Carter”

“The Hunger Games”

“Men in Black 3″

“Brave”

What movie are you most anticipating in 2012?

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/12/27/hobbits-aliens-batman-and-more-which-is-the-most-anticipated-movie-of-2012/

Empty London on Christmas morning

2012-01-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

Photos of an Empty London on Christmas Morning

For the third — and judging by my track record of being ill at Xmas — the last time, I got up early and walked into central London to hire a bike and cycle around taking photos of the city minus its human population.

Well, almost deserted, and by 10am, while still incredibly empty, most of the main areas had people walking around enjoying the atmosphere of a silent city.

Apart from the emptiness of the city, it is the silence that makes the experience such an addictive one for me.

London is never silent, not even at 3am, but on Xmas morning, it is almost silent. The background drone of aircraft approaching Heathrow has gone, and away from main roads, the streets lack the sound of car tyres rolling over tarmac.

Heading home, also a sound you never really hear now – the pealing of church bells. Not just coming from a single church you are nearby, but from all over the city as the sound carries far further than usual and surrounds you from all sides. Magical.

This year though – Christmas Eve was on a Saturday, so I thought it might be possible to photograph the City of London on Saturday and save time. Despite what people might say, the City is never empty and quiet at weekends, as builders and maintenance workers displace office workers, and road traffic is still fairly high along the main roads.

This year though, the city was unusually empty for a Saturday, and worth the effort.

A few of my favourite “Deserted London” photos below – the full set from 2011 available here. Also, theoriginal set from 2008 and some more from 2010.

Enjoy!

Well, you just have to try and recreate that famous scene from 28 Days Later.

I rather like the combination of old and new buildings, and taking it in B&W seems to work better than in colour, especially for the older buildings.

You don’t need to know anything about where this street is for it to work – as you see four lanes on the road and wide pavements and instinctively know it should be busy, but isn’t.

One of the busiest bridges across the Thames.

Again, this one seems to work better in black-and-white and the area seems to look more desolate as a result.

Busy Bank with Mansion House standing alone over one of the main road junctions in the area.

This was taken just as the sun was rising, so it lacks the “middle of the day” lighting effects of the other photos, but the empty street lined with so many shops and offices feels right for this.

Not that good technically as it was just too early in the morning – but I did have a nice chat with three policemen who also turned up to take photos in the morning.

Empty Trafalgar Square – although there were a couple of security guards huddled in a doorway nearby.

Hyde Park Corner – London’s scariest road junction looking a little safer than usual.

A giant pigeon in Picadilly Circus – presumably that advert isn’t a serving suggestion?

And the new X-Crossing at Oxford Circus. Actually not as empty as it looks, I just had to wait a while for the cars to go away. I also had a nice chat with three Chinese tourists who were stunned at the lack of public transport.

You can see the full set of 89 photos here.

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2011/12/25/photos-of-an-empty-london-on-christmas-morning/

Guantánamo Forever?

2011-12-31T04:01:00.000-08:00

IN his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” We agree. Now, to protect both, he must veto the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is expected to pass this week.

Related in Opinion

Editorial: Hobbling the Fight Against Terrorism (December 8, 2011)

This budget bill — which can be vetoed without cutting financing for our troops — is both misguided and unnecessary: the president already has the power and flexibility to effectively fight terrorism.

One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past. Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.

A second provision would mandate military custody for most terrorism suspects. It would force on the military responsibilities it hasn’t sought. This would violate not only the spirit of the post-Reconstruction act limiting the use of the armed forces for domestic law enforcement but also our trust with service members, who enlist believing that they will never be asked to turn their weapons on fellow Americans. It would sideline the work of the F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies in domestic counterterrorism. These agencies have collected invaluable intelligence because the criminal justice system — unlike indefinite military detention — gives suspects incentives to cooperate.

Mandatory military custody would reduce, if not eliminate, the role of federal courts in terrorism cases. Since 9/11, the shaky, untested military commissions have convicted only six people on terror-related charges, compared with more than 400 in the civilian courts.

A third provision would further extend a ban on transfers from Guantánamo, ensuring that this morally and financially expensive symbol of detainee abuse will remain open well into the future. Not only would this bolster Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts, it also would make it nearly impossible to transfer 88 men (of the 171 held there) who have been cleared for release. We should be moving to shut Guantánamo, not extend it.

Having served various administrations, we know that politicians of both parties love this country and want to keep it safe. But right now some in Congress are all too willing to undermine our ideals in the name of fighting terrorism. They should remember that American ideals are assets, not liabilities.

By CHARLES C. KRULAK and JOSEPH P. HOAR

Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar are retired four-star Marine generals.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketing

2011-12-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

1. The Customer Is Usually Wrong. Ensure they understand this by sending them illiterate, angry emails. That bitch got told.

2. It's Not A Lie If You Believe It. Mayor of Boston come on Bud you run a show that’s all you do.

3. Devote your hypothetical 125-strong PR team to a smear campaign of the gatekeeper who runs a key conference where you sell your clients' products.

4. When pretending to be your own former business associates, reply from your personal email address; bonus points for using this address on anabolic steroid advice forums.

5. If You're Wrong, Be Boldly Wrong. Bloggers never pay attention to carbon copied customer service complaints!

6. Name drop people who already loathe you, in a medium with a permanent record.

7. When cornered, claim that it's everyone else who is being unprofessional.

BONUS: 3 rules for Twitter stratagy.

1. If your name is not available on Twitter, change a random consonant or vowel until it becomes available. No-one will notice the difference.

2. Buy 20,000 followers, but only use the account to harangue abused customers.

3. Instead of changing your account handle when the heat is on, abandon it completely so that someone else might take it.

By Rob Beschizza

The Top 10 PR Blunders Of 2011

2011-12-23T22:27:00.000-08:00

Some blunders are unavoidable; often they are self-inflicted. One thing's for certain: 2011 provided some stunning examples of public relations disasters.

10. There are no claw backs in PR. Back in January, a guy named Mitch Delaplane thought it would be cool to write a press release that touted his brilliance as a publicist. He penned a shamelessly self-aggrandizing essay in flack-ese, calling it 'The Most Amazing Press Release Ever Written,' and then dropped a couple of hundred bucks to distribute it through PR Newswire. In it, the writer quotes himself: "I've been in the business for over ten years and have to say, I'm speechless," he said. "The title alone grabs you and demands that it be read. Then there's this quote that completely takes things to an entirely new level. I'm proud of this press release. In fact, I think it is [really] amazing." Some of the flack blogs picked up on it and a few thought his stunt was fresh and funny. In reality, it was sophomoric, unprofessional and completely cringe-worthy.

9. A Mogul's Media Meltdown. Alleged phone hacking by people on the payroll of British newspaperNews of the World turned out to be a major scandal for media mogul Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and other officials. Reporters and editors at NOTW were accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Royal Family, andpaying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims. After numerous investigations and government hearings (including one where Rupert got a cream pie in the face), the fallout was far and wide. The sackings and resignations affected journalists and law enforcement officials alike. The scandal cost Murdoch his bid for British Sky Broadcasting and even the News of the World itself, which was shuttered in July.

8. Reality Show Nuptials. It lasted a mere two and a half months -- 72 whole days of matrimony for reality TV "star" Kim Kardashian and her pro basketball player boyfriend, Kris Humphries. Entertainment Weekly.com breathlessly reported, "Ryan Seacrest, who serves as executive producer on "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," confirmed the news via his Twitter feed earlier today: "Yes @kimkardashian is filing for divorce this morning. I touched base with her, getting a statement in just a few mins." The "storybook" wedding hauled in about $18 million, according to reports that E! shelled out $15 million for the couple's two-part TV wedding special while the wedding photos brought in another $3 million. And conservatives are still using the "sanctity of marriage" excuse to argue against gay people marrying? Really?

7. Twitter #fail. It seems like now that Twitter is part of the public discourse, there will be a constant parade of idiots screwing up in measures of 140 characters or less. So I guess it's no surprise this has now become a permanent category. OK, who's first? How about @KennethCole, who couldn't resist using the Arab Spring Uprising for some shameless marketing: "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they hear our new spring collection is now available online at http://..."; a succession of tweets made by three members of Rep. Rick Larsen's (D-Wash.) legislative staff -- Seth Burroughs, legislative assistant (@therocketship1); Elizabeth Robblee, legislative assistant (@betsysbites); and Ben Byers, legislative correspondent (@byers_remorse) described on-the-job drinking, misuse of office time and resources, and public insults aimed at Larsen. The trio of numbskulls was fired -- and of course, the Big Kahuna, Rep. Anthony Weiner, who couldn't resist tweeting photos of his junk to a young woman (somehow forgetting he is married to Huma Abedin, a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton). Weiner resigned in disgrace. People, remember: if it's online, others will see it!

6. Most awesome episode of "Punked" ever. While Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) was stripping away union collective bargaining rights to state employees, he was busy scheming how to discredit the tens of thousands of very pissed-off Wisconsinites who descended on the state capitol. That's when Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy got the great idea to get Walker on the phone. He rang up the guv, posing as David Koch, half of the evil twin set known as the Koch Brothers. When "Koch" suggested planting 'troublemakers' amongst the protesters, Walker didn't blanch for a moment, even admitting that his team "had thought about that." Walker probably doesn't have much longer to ruin Wisconsin -- his recall looks imminent.

5. The return of the Know-Nothings. The Republican primary season is in full swing, and the gazillion debates so far have only made the whole exercise seem like a really bad reality show. From Rick Perry forgetting one of the three federal agencies he's cut if he were elected, to the audiences booing a gay American soldier and cheering the death of a hypothetical citizen who didn't have health insurance, anyone who was paying attention couldn't help but wonder what the hell happened to the GOP? Then in an editorial board meeting with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Herman Cain was asked what he thought about President Obama's handling of the Libya situation. He sat there dumbfounded and finally revealed his candidacy was more about performance art than it was about getting the most important job in the world.

4. Sarah Palin's Blood Libel. The Quitter from Wasilla just had to pipe in on the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz). Her ugly map that contained cross hair targets on several congressional districts across the country was duly noted in the shooting's aftermath -- one of the cross hairs hovered over Gifford's district. She managed to keep her yap shut for four days. But instead of keeping her head low, our fave hockey mom/grifter recorded a video and used an incendiary phrase in describing how she had been portrayed in the tragedy's fallout. "Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn," Palin said in the video. "Blood libel" is the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth that Jews use the blood of Christian children for certain religious rituals and holidays. It was used to justify the persecution of Jews. I believe historians will cite this as the moment that Sarah Palin became inconsequential in American politics.

3. Winning in reverse. Props to Charlie Sheen for going full-on, pedal-to-the-metal batpoop crazy in the most entertaining PR meltdown of the year. A series of insanity-laced interviews brought us all into the cramped quarters of his mind, where we learned about warlocks, tiger blood and of course, winning! Charlie might have thought he was winning, but if winning means getting fired from the best-paying gig in television, then the man has a twisted sense of scoreboard. I've met Charlie before... he seemed like a decent guy. But then again, I never had to shoot a sitcom with him. I'm guessing Jon Cryer is pretty happy these days. Pretty sure "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre is too.

2. GOP holds the U.S. economy hostage. Republican intransigence over a simple legislative maneuver nearly brought our economy to the brink of total collapse, and certainly caused a downgrade in the nation's credit rating. And as of this writing, THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! Please vote these jerks out of office, America.

1. Penn State loses it soul. Ohio State University recently found out its punishment for violation of NCAA rules (lying to officials about infractions): ineligible for a bowl game in 2012, loss of a few scholarships, etc. What it did, what the University of Southern California did to receive its punishment (Reggie Bush's improper benefits), what even Southern Methodist University did back in the 80s to get the NCAA's "Death Penalty" (under the table payments to players) pale in comparison to what happened in Happy Valley, Pa. There have been a million words written about former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual abuse of young boys. Because of his inaction, it cost the legendary Head Coach Joe Paterno his job, as well as the jobs of university President Graham Spanier, Senior Vice President Gary Schultz and Athletic Director Tim Curley. Schultz and Curley were charged with grand jury perjury and failure to report suspected child abuse by Sandusky. The indictment accused Curley and Schultz of not only failing to tell the police, but falsely telling the grand jury that Assistant Coach Mike McQueary (who allegedly witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers in 2002), never informed them of sexual activity. This is the worst thing to ever happen in college football, and as a fan I am sick to my stomach over it. Penn State badly handled the whole situation from start to finish. Hopefully, it will do everything it can, as quick as it can to regain its moral compass.

This post has been changed to reflect that Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy conducted the phone call with Governor Walker.

Follow Rich Robinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobinsonFlash

Why Emma Sullivan Is Good for Democracy

2011-12-02T17:13:00.001-08:00

Since time began, sassy teenagers have been putting authority figures in their place. The way we respond to them says a lot about the society we hope to build.

blmurch/Flickr

One thing I've learned from the Emma Sullivan flap and the reactions to my recent post on it: a lot of people think it's scarier for a teenager to wise off to her friends about a powerful man than for a governor to try to bully a teenager. The comments on my piece included a number of people who really can't understand why anyone should object to the gentle guidance offered to Emma by the governor's office ("Shut that girl up or you'll be sorry") and her principal ("Apologize to the governor or you will be punished"). But it's taken for granted that tweeting "#heblowsalot" to her whopping 65 followers constituted the worst Kansas emergency since the sack of Lawrence in 1857.

"We don't allow no free speech over this way," isn't a good reason, any more than any other part of the Constitution can be voided by saying "this isn't a due process zone."

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post concurs. "Emma Sullivan, you're lucky you're not my daughter," she clucks, the only part of the column with which I agree wholeheartedly. "[I]t was perfectly appropriate for the principal to explain how her attitude and language during an official trip reflected poorly on the school," she says primly. ("Explain" being the adult term for "threaten.") If she were Emma's mom, she would have taken away her smartphone and forced her to write the damned apology, and no backtalk, missy.

What in heaven's name did Emma tweet -- again, not to the governor's face, but to a few friends -- that threatens the Anglo-American edifice of ordered liberty? She said of him what teenagers since time began have said to their adult rulers -- indeed, what the good of society demands they say from time to time. In the words of Lewis Carroll, her tweet meant, "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" I think any American governor ought to hear this sentiment at least twice a day.

I can't help wondering whether any of these benign spirits have ever found themselves looking at the barrel of school, or state, power for the offense of saying forbidden things. I have. It was a different time and a different place, but I will never forget being told by my headmaster in 1968 that I would be expelled from school, and have my college acceptance rescinded, for making a public show of regret that Martin Luther King was dead.

It only takes one incident like that to change your view of adult "guidance" and "explanation." Because of that experience, I think, I would have said to any child of mine caught in a similar vice, "What you think and say to about politicians is your business and not theirs." Because of that experience, 40 years later, I'm a First Amendment specialist instead of holding a real job.

But as a First Amendment specialist, I think the way we treat the Emma Sullivans of the world matters quite a lot to the kind of society we build. "Talking's something you can't do judiciously," says Casper ("The Fat Man") Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, "unless you keep in practice." And more and more I wonder where Americans are supposed to keep in practice. Free speech can't take place nowhere; it needs places to be uttered and places to be heard. Adults want high schools to be speech-free zones, and more and more the courts agree. Employers want the workplace speech-free zones as well. The law supports them. Recently, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment doesn't protect even public employees who say things on the job that their employers don't approve. During this term of the Supreme Court, lawyers for a church school argued that religious bodies should have the power to fire employees who report child sexual abuse, as required by law.

So, no training in talking while you grow up. No talking on the job once you're grown up. Take down that cheeky tweet. Clean up that Facebook page. What about college, where students are supposed to speak their minds and follow truth wherever it may lead? Well, sure, as long as it's, well, decorous. "University officials have generally bureaucratized and limited assembly and speech on campus," notes Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School, author of Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places. "Many campuses have adopted 'free speech zones' and other restrictions."

The "free speech zone" is a marvelous invention in which certain parts of the campus are designated for expression. Gradually the rest of the campus is then shut off from bothersome protest and agitation. It's an elegant way of making the First Amendment disappear: under that antiquated document, "the freedom of speech" is guaranteed everywhere in public -- unless there's a very strong reason why itcan't be allowed. "We don't allow no free speech over this way," isn't a good reason, any more than any other part of the Constitution can be voided by saying "this isn't a due process zone."

And once free speech is zoned, even the "zones" may not be quite so free as all that. At one campus I taught at, a graduate student went to the "free speech zone" and delivered a piece of performance art beginning "Fuck you, fuck your friends, fuck your parents . . . ." He didn't get much further before a campus cop told him, "You can't talk like that in the free speech zone," and led him away in handcuffs.

As we learned November 18, administrators at universities like the University California Davis are like administrators everywhere else. The campus cops pepper-sprayed those bothersomely peaceful students as if they were a nest of hornets. The resulting outrage took the administration by surprise; college administrators, in my experience, don't put up with a lot of back-talk from students or faculty, and usually can't believe it when they are finally forced to listen.

What about parks and streets, which, the Supreme Court once told us, "have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions"? Well, there's a battle on there, too. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is one thing; Occupy Wall Street is another. As Zick notes, "The occupiers have demonstrated the critical need for public gathering places and officials, with some notable exceptions, have tried to respect citizens' First Amendment rights to assemble and speak in public forums."

Those exceptions really are notable, though. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg's patience ran out, police moved in -- and reporters who tried to write down or photograph what the cops were doing risked pepper spray or the business end of a billyclub. It's not our business.

OWS's struggle for public space -- space to question the very economic foundations of our system -- illustrates the dwindling scope of free speech in our regimented, "watch-your-potty-mouth" society. Free speech is less and less a personal right of the Emma Sullivans laughing at governors, and more and more a property right of powerful institutions -- political parties, churches, media organizations, corporations -- deriding and silencing their critics.

Or to put it in terms the current age might understand, if Emma Sullivan wanted to use her First Amendment right to make fun of Sam Brownback, why didn't she just form a corporate SuperPAC and buy TV time, the way James Madison intended?

GARRETT EPPS - Garrett Epps, a former reporter for The Washington Post, is a novelist and legal scholar. He teaches courses in constitutional law and creative writing for law students at the University of Baltimore. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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Go Big, Mr. Obama

2011-11-23T12:20:00.001-08:00

President Obama has a clear choice on how to approach the 2012 election: He can spend all his energy defining Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or whoever ends up as the Republican nominee in as ugly a way as possible, or he can spend all his energy defining the future in as credible a way as possible. If he spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression. He’s fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way. He’s making health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions, and he saved the auto industry. This is big stuff. But, as important as all of these achievements are, they pale in comparison to the defining challenge of Obama’s presidency: Can he put the country on a sustainable economic recovery path at a time when, if we fail, it could be the end of the American dream?

I believe the best way for Obama to do that is by declaring today that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left.

“I think what happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy,” Warren Buffett said on CNBC last week. “They work like a devil for 10 months. ... They compromise. They bring in people as far apart as [Democratic Senator Dick] Durbin and [Republican Senator Tom] Coburn to get them to sign on and then they’re totally ignored. I think that’s a travesty.”

The president will never get the near-term stimulus through that he wants and that the economy needs without combining it with a credible bipartisan, multiyear deficit-reduction plan like Simpson-Bowles. Moreover, “a free-standing stimulus that is not combined with a credible multiyear plan that truly stabilizes our fiscal imbalances would not solve our problems,” argues Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “because if nobody knows what is waiting around the corner, after the stimulus runs out,” many people will just take that money and stuff it in a mattress “rather than in investments or spending.”

Obama aides argue that so many G.O.P. lawmakers are committed to making his presidency fail, or have signed pledges to an antitax cult, that they would never buy into any grand bargain. I think that is true for a lot of Republicans in Congress. But I have some questions: Why are the Republicans getting away with this? Why are so many independents and even Democrats who voted for Obama sitting on their hands? Obama owns the bully pulpit of the presidency and he’s losing to Grover Norquist? Also, assuming it is all true about the G.O.P., how can Obama trump them? I think he can, if he leads in a new way.

I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing. People know leadership when they see it — when they see someone taking a political risk, not just talking about doing so, not just saying, “I’ll jump if the other guy jumps.” In times of crisis, leaders jump first, lay out what truly needs to be done to fix the problem, not just to win re-election, and by doing so earn the right to demand that others do the same.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare. That is the Simpson-Bowles plan, and it should be Obama’s new starting point for negotiations. The deficit plan Obama put out last September is nowhere near as serious. “It is watered-down Simpson-Bowles,” said MacGuineas. “Most people don’t even know it exists.”

Second, he’d offer a plan in which the wealthy have to pay their fair share and more, because they’ve had a great two decades. But everyone, including the middle class, has to contribute something. This has to be a national effort. Third, he would offer a plan that is aspirational. It would not just be a roadmap to balancing the budget but to making America great again through reignited economic growth.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Go big, Mr. President. You will win, and so will America.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The GOP Divide Over Illegal Immigrants: Are They People or Abstractions? - The Atlantic

2011-11-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

The GOP Divide Over Illegal Immigrants: Are They People or Abstractions? - The Atlantic

Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

2011-11-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

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2011-11-12T23:40:00.001-08:00

<a href="http://hudsonmusic.com.au/track/against-the-grain">Against The Grain by Hudson</a>

How Great Companies Think Differently

2011-11-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Idea in Brief

Traditional theories of the firm are dominated by the notion of opposition between capital and labor, disconnecting business from society and posing conflicts between them. According to this view, companies are nothing more than money-generating machines.

By contrast, great companies use a different operating logic. They believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and like the family, government, and religion, has been one of its pillars for centuries.

Great companies work to make money, but in their choices of how to do so, they consider whether they are building enduring institutions. As a result, they invest in the future while being aware of the needs of people and society.

There are six facets of institutional logic, which radically alters leadership and corporate behavior: a common purpose; a long-term view; emotional engagement; community building; innovation; and self-organization.

Artwork: Sarah Morris, Midtown—HBO/Grace, 1999, Gloss household paint on canvas, 213.4 × 213.4 cm

It’s time that beliefs and theories about business catch up with the way great companies operate and how they see their role in the world today. Traditionally, economists and financiers have argued that the sole purpose of business is to make money—the more the better. That conveniently narrow image, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term profits and delivering returns to shareholders. Their decisions are expressed in financial terms.

I say convenient because this lopsided logic forces companies to blank out the fact that they command enormous resources that influence the world for better or worse and that their strategies shape the lives of the employees, partners, and consumers on whom they depend. Above all, the traditional view of business doesn’t capture the way great companies think their way to success. Those firms believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and they acknowledge that, like family, government, and religion, it has been one of society’s pillars since the dawn of the industrial era. Great companies work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. They invest in the future while being aware of the need to build people and society.

In this article, I turn the spotlight on this very different logic—a social or institutional logic—which lies behind the practices of many widely admired, high-performing, and enduring companies. In those firms, society and people are not afterthoughts or inputs to be used and discarded but are core to their purpose. My continuing field research on admired and financially successful companies in more than 20 countries on four continents is the basis for my thinking about the role of institutional logic in business.

Institutional logic holds that companies are more than instruments for generating money; they are also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them. According to this school of thought, the value that a company creates should be measured not just in terms of short-term profits or paychecks but also in terms of how it sustains the conditions that allow it to flourish over time. These corporate leaders deliver more than just financial returns; they also build enduring institutions.

Rather than viewing organizational processes as ways of extracting more economic value, great companies create frameworks that use societal value and human values as decision-making criteria. They believe that corporations have a purpose and meet stakeholders’ needs in many ways: by producing goods and services that improve the lives of users; by providing jobs and enhancing workers’ quality of life; by developing a strong network of suppliers and business partners; and by ensuring financial viability, which provides resources for improvements, innovations, and returns to investors.

In developing an institutional perspective, corporate leaders internalize what economists have usually regarded as externalities and define a firm around its purpose and values. They undertake actions that produce societal value—whether or not those actions are tied to the core functions of making and selling goods and services. Whereas the aim of financial logic is to maximize the returns on capital, be it shareholder or owner value, the thrust of institutional logic is to balance public interest with financial returns.

Institutional logic should be aligned with economic logic but need not be subordinate to it. For example, all companies require capital to carry out business activities and sustain themselves. However, at great companies profit is not the sole end; rather, it is a way of ensuring that returns will continue. The institutional view of the firm is thus no more idealized than is the profit-maximizing view. Well-established practices, such as R&D and marketing, cannot be tied to profits in the short or long runs, yet analysts applaud them. If companies are to serve a purpose beyond their business portfolios, CEOs must expand their investments to include employee empowerment, emotional engagement, values-based leadership, and related societal contributions.

Business history provides numerous examples of industrialists who developed enduring corporations that also created social institutions. The Houghton family established Corning Glass and the town of Corning, New York, for instance. The Tata family established one of India’s leading conglomerates and the steel city of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. That style of corporate responsibility for society fell out of fashion as economic logic and shareholder capitalism came to dominate assumptions about business and corporations became detached from particular places. In today’s global world, however, companies must think differently.

Globalization increases the speed of change; more competitors from more places produce surprises and shocks. An intensely competitive global economy places a high premium on innovation, which depends on human imagination, motivation, and collaboration. Global mergers and acquisitions add further complexity, with their success resting on how effectively the organizations are integrated. Moreover, seeking legitimacy or public approval by aligning corporate objectives with social values has become a business imperative. Corporations that cross borders face questions of cultural fit and local appropriateness; they must gain approval from governmental authorities, opinion leaders, and members of the public wherever they operate. Their employees are both internal actors and the company’s representatives in the external community.

Only if leaders think of themselves as builders of social institutions can they master today’s changes and challenges. I believe that institutional logic should take its place alongside economic or financial logic as a guiding principle in research, analysis, education, policy, and managerial decision making. In the following pages, I will describe six ways in which great companies use institutional logic, how it gives them an advantage, and how the perspective can radically change leadership and corporate behavior.

A Common Purpose

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution serves as a buffer against uncertainty and change by providing corporations with a coherent identity.

As companies grow, acquire, and divest, the business mix changes frequently and job roles often vary across countries. So what exactly gives a company a coherent identity? Where are the sources of certainty that permit people to take action in an uncertain world? Purpose and values—not the widgets made—are at the core of an organization’s identity, and they can guide people in their efforts to find new widgets that serve society.

Consider the Mahindra Group, an $11 billion multibusiness company based in Mumbai that employs 117,000 people in 100 countries. Like many emerging-market enterprises, the Mahindra Group operates in many industries, including automobiles, finance, IT, and several dozen others. And like the great companies, it invests in creating a culture based on a common purpose to provide coherence amidst diversity, proclaiming that it is “many companies united by a common purpose—to enable people to rise.”

Globalization detaches organizations from one specific society but at the same time requires that companies internalize the needs of many societies. Establishing clear institutional values can help resolve this complex issue. For example, PepsiCo has made health a big part of its aspiration to achieve Performance with Purpose. Nutrition, environmental responsibility, and talent retention are pillars supporting the slogan. Performance with Purpose provides strategic direction and motivation for diverse lines of business in many countries. It requires a gradual shift of resources from “fun for you” to “better for you” to “good for you,” in PepsiCo parlance. It provides a rationale for acquisitions and investments. It is the logic behind the creation of a new organizational unit, the Global Nutrition Group, and new corporate roles, such as chief global health officer. It guides a quest to reduce or eliminate sugar and sodium in foods and beverages. Above all, it provides an identity for the people who work for PepsiCo all over the world.

Leaders can compensate for business uncertainty through institutional grounding. Great companies identify something larger than transactions or business portfolios to provide purpose and meaning. Meaning making is a central function of leaders, and purpose gives coherence to the organization. Institutional grounding involves efforts to build and reinforce organizational culture, but it is more than that. Culture is often a by-product of past actions, a passively generated outgrowth of history. Institutional grounding is an investment in activities and relationships that may not immediately create a direct road to business results but that reflect the values the institution stands for and how it will endure.

Institutional grounding can separate the survivors from those subsumed by global change. A sense of purpose infuses meaning into an organization, “institutionalizing” the company as a fixture in society and providing continuity between the past and the future. The name can change, but the identity and purpose will live on. In 2007, Spain’s Grupo Santander acquired Brazil’s Banco Real and folded it into its Brazilian assets. But Banco Real’s spirit involved much more than its financial assets. Its then-CEO Fabio Barbosa was put in charge of creating the combined entity, Santander Brazil. Although the new organization faced pressure to increase branch profitability, under Barbosa’s leadership Banco Real’s focus on social and environmental responsibility, along with its private banking model, were infused throughout Santander Brazil and the parent.

Successful mergers are noteworthy for their emphasis on values and culture. When the merger of two Swiss pharmaceutical companies formed Novartis in 1996, CEO Daniel Vasella wanted the new company’s mission to be globally meaningful and central to the integration and growth strategy. The question was how to provide employees with a tangible experience that reflected those values. When I floated the idea of a global day of community service—unheard of in Europe at that time—Novartis agreed. The company allowed each country organization to determine how it wanted to serve local communities, based on its interpretation of what the two histories and one future would suggest. The day of service has become an annual Novartis event, held on the merger’s anniversary.

Affirming purpose and values through service is a regular part of how great companies express their identities. In June 2011, IBM celebrated its 100th anniversary by offering service to the world. Over 300,000 IBMers signed up to perform 2.6 million hours of service on a global service day. They contributed training and access to software tools, many of them developed specially for the occasion, to schools, governmental agencies, and NGOs. Projects included training on privacy and antibullying in 100 schools in Germany; a new website developed in India for the visually impaired, with a launch at 50 locations; and access to small-business resources for women entrepreneurs in the United States. The company gave the tools away, even in cases where the software could form the basis for commercial products, to demonstrate IBM’s commitment to being a contributor to society.

A Long-Term Focus

Thinking of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective that can justify any short-term financial sacrifices required to achieve the corporate purpose and to endure over time.

Keeping a company alive requires resources, so financial logic demands attention to the numbers. However, great companies are willing to sacrifice short-term financial opportunities if they are incompatible with institutional values. Those values guide matters central to the company’s identity and reputation such as product quality, the nature of the customers served, and by-products of the manufacturing process. Banco Real, for instance, created a screening process to assess potential customers’ societal standards as well as their financial standing. The bank was willing to walk away from those that did not meet its tests of environmental and social responsibility. This short-term sacrifice was prudent risk management for the longer term.

Companies using institutional logic are often willing to invest in the human side of the organization—investments that cannot be justified by immediate financial returns but that help create sustainable institutions. In South Korea, after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Shinhan Bank set out to acquire Chohung Bank, a larger and older bank that the government had bailed out. The moment the acquisition was announced, 3,500 male employees of a Chohung Bank union, whose ranks extended to management levels, shaved their heads in protest and piled the hair in front of Shinhan’s headquarters in downtown Seoul. The acquirer then had to decide whether to go ahead with the acquisition and, if it did so, what it ought to do about Chohung’s employees.

Shinhan’s leaders applied institutional logic. They negotiated an agreement with the Chohung union, deferring formal integration for three years, giving equal representation to both Shinhan and Chohung managers on a new management committee, and increasing the salary of Chohung employees to match the higher wages of Shinhan employees. The acquirer also handed out 3,500 caps to cover the heads of the protestors. Shinhan invested heavily in what it called “emotional integration,” holding a series of retreats and conferences intended not only to spread strategic and operational information but also to foster social bonding and a feeling of being “one bank.” According to financial logic, the acquirer was wasting money. In terms of Shinhan’s institutional logic, the investments were an essential part of securing the future.

The result: Within 18 months, Shinhan had grown both banks’ customer bases, and the Chohung union was having a hard time fomenting discontent against the benign acquirer. Although a formal merger wouldn’t occur for another year and a half, Shinhan and Chohung employees were working together on task forces and discussing best practices, and ideas were spreading that began to make the branches look more similar. Employees were, in essence, self-organizing. By the third year, when formal integration took place, Shinhan was outperforming not only the banking industry but also the South Korean stock market.

Emotional Engagement

The transmission of institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate motivation, and propel self-regulation or peer regulation.

Utilitarian rationality is not the only force governing corporate performance and behavior inside organizations; emotions play a major role, too. Moods are contagious, and they can affect such issues as absenteeism, health, and levels of effort and energy. People influence one another, and in doing so they either increase or decrease others’ performance levels, as my study of teams and organizations on winning and losing streaks reveals (see my book Confidence, Crown, 2004). Well-understood values and principles can be a source of emotional appeal, which can increase employee engagement. Having a statement of values has become common, so the issue is not whether a set of words called “values” exists somewhere in the company. Adhering to institutional logic makes the regular articulation of values core to the company’s work. The CEOs of companies I studied, whether headquartered in the U.S., Mexico, the UK, India, or Japan, allocated considerable resources and their own time to breathing new life into long-standing values statements, engaging managers at many levels in the institutional task of communicating values. The point was not the words themselves but the process of nurturing a dialogue that would keep social purpose at the forefront of everyone’s mind and ensure that employees use the organizational values as a guide for business decisions.

As a Procter & Gamble executive, Robert McDonald had long believed that the company’s Purpose, Values, and Principles was a cornerstone of its culture, evoking strong emotions in employees and giving meaning to the company’s brands. Within a month of becoming CEO in 2010, he elevated the purpose—improving the lives of the world’s consumers—into a business strategy: improving more lives in more places more completely.

In P&G West Africa, for instance, every employee has a quantitatively measurable purpose-driven goal: How have I touched this year? So P&G West Africa’s Baby Care Group set up Pampers mobile clinics to reduce high rates of infant mortality and help babies thrive. A physician and two nurses travel the region in a van, teaching postnatal care, examining babies, and referring mothers to hospitals for follow-ups or immunization shots. They also register mothers for mVillage, a text-message service (many of the poor in West Africa have cell phones) that offers health tips and the chance to ask questions of health care professionals. At the end of each mobile clinic visit, everyone gets two Pampers diapers. The emotional tugs for P&G employees are strong; they feel inspired by the fact that their product is at the center of a mission to save lives. They also feel proud that Pampers’ sales have soared and that West Africa is among P&G’s fastest-growing markets.

In companies that think of themselves as social institutions, work is emotionally compelling and meaning resides in the organization as a whole rather than in a less sustainable cult of personality. Top leaders exemplify and communicate the company’s purpose and values, but everyone owns them, and the values become embedded in tasks, goals, and performance standards. Rather than depending on charismatic figures, great companies “routinize” charisma so that it spreads throughout the organization.

Partnering with the Public

The need to cross borders and sectors to tap new business opportunities must be accompanied by concern for public issues beyond the boundaries of the firm, requiring the formation of public-private partnerships in which executives consider societal interests along with their business interests.

One paradox of globalization is that it can increase the need for local connections. To thrive in diverse geographies and political jurisdictions, companies must build a base of relationships in each country with government officials and public intermediaries as well as suppliers and customers. Only by doing so can companies ensure that agendas are aligned even as circumstances—and public officials—keep changing. Those external stakeholders are interested as much in the corporations’ contributions to the local community as they are in their transactional capabilities. At the same time, great companies want both an extended family of enduring relationships and a seat at the table on policy matters affecting their business.

Public-private partnerships to address societal needs are growing in number and importance, and are especially prevalent among enterprises that think institutionally. Partnerships can take many forms: International activities, conducted in collaboration with the United Nations and other global organizations (such as Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water program with UNICEF and several NGOs); large domestic projects, undertaken in collaboration with government ministries and development agencies (PepsiCo’s agricultural projects in Mexico with the Inter-American Development Bank, for example); product or service development to address unmet societal needs (for instance, P&G’s linkages with public hospitals in West Africa); or short-term volunteer efforts (IBM’s work following the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes in China and Japan to provide software to track relief supplies and reunite families).

Companies that operate using institutional logic reap substantive benefits.

Institutional logic is built on a foundation of purpose and values, which serve as a buffer against uncertainty and change.

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective. Short-term financial sacrifice becomes permissible in the interest of positioning the firm for sustainable success.

Strong institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate intrinsic motivation, and propel self- or peer regulation.

Great companies see business as a primary pillar of society. This focus facilitates the kind of cross-border and cross-sector engagement needed to tap global opportunities. Through the formation of public-private partnerships, firms consider the public interest along with business priorities.

The attention placed on social conditions often generates experiences and ideas that lead to learning for innovation in products, services, and business models.

In a firm steered by institutional logic, employees can be treated as self-determining professionals, coordinating and integrating activities and producing innovation through self-organization in addition to formal assignments.

In companies that adhere to an institutional logic, executives cultivate relationships with public officials neither as a quid pro quo nor to push through particular deals. Rather, they seek to understand and contribute to the public agenda even as they influence it. For example, PepsiCo’s chief global health officer, who came from the World Health Organization, is planning a cross-sector project to reduce childhood obesity. IBM’s CEO, Samuel Palmisano, circumnavigates the globe six or seven times a year to meet with national and regional officials, discussing how IBM can help their countries achieve their goals. This is not sales or marketing; it’s a high-level conversation to demonstrate the company’s commitment to furthering the development of the countries it operates in. Such engagement at the top helps other IBM leaders get a seat at the table when discussions about the country’s future take place.

Institution building requires the efforts of many people. The more interested that top leaders are in external relations, the more likely they are to involve others and to reward them for building relationships with the nation and community. Although relatively few people might hold formal responsibility for these external interfaces, a great many might perform institutional work by volunteering, attending public meetings, and participating in community service. Such activity projects a sense of authentic motivation. Community building is not a hard sell for people native to an area or for long-term residents; there is an emotional pull of place that makes such work desirable. For others whose careers take them across geographies, this work is a way to connect their organizational roles with the places they now live, making them feel more rooted.

When leaders come to see themselves as having societal purpose, they can choose to get involved at local, national, and even global levels. A few years ago, the head of IBM Greater China organized a personal diplomatic mission to Washington, meeting with White House officials and U.S. politicians to discuss the impact of China’s emergence as an economic superpower. He had a desire to see both nations thrive and believed that his role in a global company afforded him a unique perspective. After retiring in 2009, he remained an IBM “super alum,” in company parlance, and was supported by IBM in attending a major U.S. university for a year, with the company’s support, to learn about health care. At the end of 2010, he returned to China and launched an initiative with a Chinese government institute to develop an IT-enabled evidence base for traditional Chinese medicine that will build on IBM ties.

Innovation

Articulating a purpose broader than making money can guide strategies and actions, open new sources for innovation, and help people express corporate and personal values in their everyday work.

Companies’ claims that they serve society become credible when leaders allocate time, talent, and resources to national or community projects without seeking immediate returns and when they encourage people from one country to serve another. IBM’s Corporate Service Corp, for instance, develops future leaders by sending diverse teams of the company’s best talent on monthlong projects around the world. The attention placed on social needs often generates ideas that lead to innovations. For Cemex, operating by institutional logic and considering unmet societal needs produced innovations such as antibacterial concrete, which is particularly important for hospitals and farms; water-resistant concrete, useful in flood-prone areas; and road surface material derived from old tires, desirable in countries that are building roads rapidly. An idea from Egypt for saltwater-resistant concrete, helpful for harbor and marine applications, became a product launched in the Philippines.

Institution building helps connect partners across an ecosystem, producing business model innovation. Cemex started Construrama, a distribution program for small hardware stores, in 2001 as a response to competition from Home Depot and Lowe’s, which were then entering Latin America. Construrama offers the small stores training, support, a strong brand, and easy access to products. In accordance with its values, Cemex sought dealers who were trusted in their communities, rejecting candidates whose business tactics didn’t meet the company’s ethics standards. Cemex owns the Construrama brand and handles promotions but doesn’t charge distributors, operate stores, or have decision-making authority. It requires, however, that stores meet its service standards. Among those is participation in community-building philanthropic endeavors—expanding an orphanage or improving a school, for instance. By the mid-2000s, Construrama had opened enough stores to qualify as a large retail chain in Latin America and was expanding into other developing countries.

Creating opportunities for individuals to use company resources to serve society furthers institution-building goals. Novartis employees serve in hospitals, where they see firsthand the challenges of disease and how their drugs are used. In 2011, P&G employees set out in Tide Loads of Hope vans to visit communities in the southern U.S. ravaged by floods. In the mobile Laundromats, managers and other professionals washed and folded clothes for local people, getting to know them and their circumstances. These kinds of interactions express corporate values and produce valuable learning, too.

Self-Organization

Great companies assume they can trust people and can rely on relationships, not just rules and structures. They are more likely to treat employees as self-determining professionals who coordinate and integrate activities by self-organizing and generating new ideas.

Institutional logic holds that people are not paycheck-hungry shirkers who want to do the bare minimum, nor are they robots that can be ordered to produce high performance. Instead, employees make their own choices about which ideas to surface, how much effort to put into them, and where they might contribute beyond their day jobs. Resource allocation is thus determined not only by formal strategies and budgetary processes but also by the informal relationships, spontaneous actions, and preferences of people at all levels.

Fully understanding a company requires knowledge of its social structure and informal networks, and optimizing performance requires social investments. At Shinhan Bank, the two banks self-integrated through social bonds and relationships well in advance of the three-year mark when official integration was to take place. The new connections manifested in such actions as each bank’s voluntarily hanging the other’s banner in its headquarters. At Procter & Gamble, managers in Brazil turned strategic and organizational traditions on their head to develop low-cost, high-quality alternatives to premium products. They undertook this risky initiative on their own and self-organized to ensure closer cross-functional teamwork and partnerships with customers. They felt that they had an obligation to improve the lives of consumers who could not afford premium products. Similar institutional logic led the P&G Himalaya team, a global cross-functional group, to find ways to make Gillette razors affordable and desirable to men often bloodied by barbers using rusty or worn-out blades.

Managers in great companies understand that formal structures can be too general or too rigid to accommodate multidirectional pathways for resource and idea flows. Rigidity stifles innovation. Informal, self-organizing, shape-changing, and temporary networks are more flexible and can make connections between people or connect bundles of resources more quickly. Employees’ formal roles come to resemble the home base from which they are continuously mobile as they carry out daily tasks and projects, develop work relationships, and participate in team or group activities. Matrix organizations—in which individuals report to two or more bosses depending on the different dimensions of their tasks—become what I dub a matrix on steroids. People are accountable along many dimensions simultaneously, attending to multiple projects and using their networks to assemble resources for all those projects, often without going through a decision-making hierarchy.

Although there is a drudgery and confinement component to many jobs—plenty of Cemex employees work in factories, Shinhan’s banks have tellers stuck behind counters, and every company has stay-at-desk support staff—trusting people to make choices about where, when, and with whom they should work makes jobs more engaging. For example, on any given day about 40% of IBMers in the U.S. do not go to an IBM office. They work at home or at customer sites, moving between locations and taking vacations at times of their choosing. IBM’s work-at-home programs, such as the one started in Japan in 2001, have caught the attention of governments interested in keeping women with technical degrees in the workforce. In some cases, IBM offers allowances to support infrastructure in the home, which has enabled a Harvard graduate working in India to combine project work with child-rearing, for instance, and a software manager from Egypt to move with her husband to Dubai.

Institutional logic assumes that people can be trusted to care about the fate of the whole enterprise—not just about their own jobs or promotions—and to catalyze improvements and innovations without waiting for instructions or sticking to the letter of a job description. Job descriptions nowadays document only part of what people do; performance reviews and salary bands capture only some of the activities through which people might add the most value for the company.

When people self-organize to create networks to share information, new initiatives or innovations are often the result. Organizations must encourage the creation of such networks, of course, and facilitate them through communication platforms or meeting spaces, but the networks usually flourish best if they spring from volunteers who do things that bosses might not have anticipated. What’s more, these self-organized networks often keep good ideas alive long after an organization would have abandoned them.

For example, three PepsiCo managers in Latin America had shared a dream for around a decade of developing new kinds of potatoes that were suitable for southern climates, less starchy, and environmentally sustainable. They felt that the initiative should be based in Peru, the potato’s birthplace. The troika remained in contact despite their moving to different locations, and even after years of ho-hum response, they presented their ideas wherever they could. They eventually received a boost when a new Peruvian potato chip whose creation they championed became a sensation. The chips, which used multicolored potatoes from small farmers in remote villages in the Andes, combined nutrition, tastiness, and social contribution. Proof of concept turned the dream into reality: In August 2010, CEO Indra Nooyi announced the establishment of a global potato development center in Peru, headed by one of the three champions.

Self-organizing communities can be a potent force for change, propelling companies in directions they might not have taken otherwise. People with no formal orders serve as explorers and entrepreneurs. For example, had it not been for self-forming networks, IBM might have lagged behind or even missed out on two big business ideas: virtualization and green computing. These emerged as among IBM’s top strategic priorities after an Innovation Jam in July 2006, a web chat spanning several days to which over 140,000 employees contributed ideas.

The virtualization initiative came together outside of formal structures and, initially, as a voluntary activity. Some 200 early adopters of virtual platforms—such as Linden Labs’ Second Life and similar platforms—found each other through the company’s chat rooms and created an ad hoc group of people who shared ideas in their free time through avatars and weekly phone calls, with conference lines sometimes open in the virtual world, too. After a year of informal self-organization, the network found an IBM executive sponsor. IBM then designated virtualization an emerging business opportunity and provided funding for it.

My argument has come full circle. A logic that justifies treating employees as self-determining volunteers—in essence, as true professionals who care about high performance because they believe in the company as institution—makes it important to have a motivating purpose and values to provide coherence and common identity. The first enables the last. The six principles I describe in this article are interrelated and share many characteristics. Especially for great global companies, institution building is not the result of carrying out specific activities but a coherent, holistic pursuit in which elements reinforce one another, are inextricably intertwined, and reflect a logic and leadership style that permeate the corporation.

Skeptics abound, of course. Firms that present themselves as institutions concerned with serving society often come under more scrutiny than others do, and they must withstand criticism about the gap between stated aspirations and performance, financially and socially. If they make money while doing good, they will be criticized for manipulation; if they do some good but not enough to solve complex problems, they will be criticized for lack of courage or commitment. Despite a growing number of advocates for a new kind of capitalism that finds win-win opportunities by creating value for both business and society, there is still controversy over the obligations of business.

The great global enterprises are not waiting for grand new theories or perfect answers. Their leaders already use an institutional or social logic to supplement economic or financial logic in guiding and growing their enterprises. Institutional logic cannot be captured by cost-benefit equations or reduced to the language of economics, and yet it turns out to be a powerful driver of financial performance.

Leaders in the great companies can tell a different story about the basis for their decisions. In so doing, they are able to produce new models for action that can restore confidence in business and will change the world in which we live.

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the chair and director of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her most recent book is SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good (Crown, 2009).

Five Things to Never Say to Your Direct Reports

2011-11-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs, and as often happens, the discussion turned to complaints about managing employees. This is a common topic among those in management positions — find me a manager, and I’ll show you someone who wants to vent.

Don't say it! (Image by Stuart Miles)

As a person being managed, this can be disquieting to hear. After all, I’m sure you believe you’re doing a great job and should be considered with accolades! However, the reason this is a passionate, evergreen topic is because managers realize that positive, productive employees are critical to success — both their own and the organization’s. We get wrapped around the axle about the things we care about most. And of course perspective plays a leading role. We can only see what we can see.

As a coach, I have an interesting vantage point where I am in constant conversation with all sides. (I see the situation far differently than when I was a business owner responsible for a hefty salary line.) I know the manager’s frustration that comes with simply wanting your employees to do a good job with minimal intervention. And I hear the concerns of employees trying to understand and meet a manager’s expectations while attempting to do their best job.

In the middle of these competing perspectives, frustration thrives and judgment errs. I wrote earlier this year about statements you should never make to your boss, and so this one is for you, managers.

There are a lot of internal conversations getting verbalized that should stay right there in the comfortable recesses of a manager’s brain. I know it feels good to get some of these all-too-common sentiments out, but the result is never positive.

1. “That’s what you get paid to do.”

Managers (and to an even greater extent, business owners) feel constantly pinged with requests for monetary and non-monetary rewards, and it can feel tempting to rejoin with, “Why should I reward you extra for doing the job you’re paid to do!” This front line job of balancing needs versus wants is exhausting and no one blames you for feeling that way. Often your own needs come last.

However, employees generally don’t see it quite so cut and dried. Sure they get a paycheck, but they still expect to be recognized for good work within their job description. Some version of recognition consistently falls in the top five reasons employees stay in their positions. You’re better off getting creative and committing to rewards than fighting them. Especially when the job market recovers, you’ll lose.

2. “I never did that when I was in your position.”

This is a spin on the age-old sentiment “these kids today…,” As a leader, it’s tempting to look back on what you did when you were in a junior position and congratulate yourself on your own stellar work ethic and ambition. This is especially true when generational differences crop up — for example how the much-covered Millennials seem to want it all from Day One.

This is never a fair comparison. First, you don’t know what it was like to manage you because you weren’t your own manager. Hindsight is notoriously unreliable as we remember our achievements better than our struggles. Even if you do recall yourself accurately, everyone’s actions are bounded by their unique circumstances, whether situational or generational. There’s no way to know what you would do in someone else’s situation, or they in yours. And finally, there’s a reason that you’re the boss — you’re motivated by certain goals that others may not share. Stop worrying about what motivates you — and consider what motivates them.

3. “I want you to be more proactive.”

My clients will sometimes throw up their hands in a struggle to pin down exactly what they want from their employees with the catchall admonition to “be more proactive.” As the manager, you may know exactly what that means because you’re a seasoned problem solver with an ability to anticipate issues ahead of time. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.

Now realize that others likely don’t share your idea what being proactive means because they don’t have your same vantage point. You see more, have a greater context, and the authority to step into any situation. If you want more get-up-and-go behavior from team members, you’re more likely to get it if you use specific requests.

4. “You need to spend more time in the office.”

Time in the office is usually a red herring for a performance problem of another kind. We all know folks who log in plenty of face time but are ineffective. We’re in a time when work teams are more distributed and remote than ever — and all indications are that this will increase. Managing someone’s office hours feels old-fashioned and frankly, a bit controlling. A recent article in Harvard Business Review, How Great Companies Think Differently, states that great companies allow people to self-organize. Forty percent of IBMers in the U.S. don’t go to an office on any given day, but work in locations of their choosing.

If the issue is that a client’s needs aren’t met or team communication is lacking, call that out. It’s the employee’s job to fix it, and if she can’t or won’t, you have a different problem to solve.

5. “It will be faster if I do it myself.”

Delegation is a perennial coaching issue because most people struggle with it. (For my best delegation tips, refer back to my earlier post.) However, no matter how tempted you may be, resist the urge to take on work to be expeditious.

Doing versus delegating hurts you long term because you’re missing a development opportunity for your staff, and you have limited bandwidth. But also, for employees this is the same as saying they’re incompetent and untrustworthy. It feels rotten and demotivating, and sets up a dynamic where people won’t even try because you’re going to do it your way anyway. A major part of being a manager is developing others behind you, and you do this through managing their work product. Even when it’s harder than doing it yourself.

Managers have had a tough few years with recessionary restructurings and reduced staffs. It’s understandable to be frustrated, but resist the urge to show it. While the job market is tight now, a recent survey showed that there is serious pent-up attrition, with 40% turnover not unlikely in the next two years.

If you want your good people to stay, you’re the ticket. An employee’s relationship to their manager is a primary factor in retention. But you already knew that, right? That’s why you’re reading this.

NOVEMBER 2, 2011 BY KRISTIHEDGES

This post also appears on Forbes.com.

Advertising Companies Fret Over a Digital Talent Gap

2011-11-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

When the Ad:tech advertising technology conference hits New York next week, marketers, advertising agencies and recruiters may spend less time listening to the panelists and more time working the floor to find new employees.

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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Edwin Lee of MediaMath said he helped companies with subjects “they don’t really understand.”

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A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills. The dilemma, one familiar to many industries across the country, is particularly acute for jobs that require hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills.

The talent pool, advertising technology company executives say, is not a deep one. And those who have the skills are in high demand, often fetching annual salaries that can reach $100,000.

“There is pain for hiring in digital at all levels,” said John Ebbert, managing editor of AdExchanger.com, a Web site dedicated to advertising technology.

“The marketers, the publishers, the ad tech companies, the agencies, data management companies — they’re all going for the same type of employee.”

The job board on AdExchanger, which is updated every 45 days, has postings for positions with titles like “Yield Optimization Manager” and “Director of Platform Marketing.” The number of jobs on the board has nearly doubled in the past year, Mr. Ebbert said, to 80 jobs every 45 days from 40.

The digital talent gap is driven in part by the enormous amount of user data that ad tech companies are collecting for agencies and marketers — data that is instrumental in directing ads to consumers and analyzing trends. New hires are needed for a variety of tasks, including writing code, creating digital advertisements, Web site development and statistical analysis.

“The demand has far outstripped the supply,” said Joe Zawadzki, the chief executive of MediaMath, an ad tech company in New York. “The number of things that you need to know is high and the number of people that have grown up knowing it is low.”

Mr. Zawadzki said that as of last week his company had 13 positions open and had gone to job boards, recruiters and even hosted technology-focused meet-ups to find people. In September, the company hired its first senior vice president for human capital to help with recruitment.

On average, Mr. Zawadzki said, it takes two to three months to find the right person — someone with a combination of pure quantitative skills, applied marketing skills and an understanding of how the advertising technology business works. With a limited talent pool, many ad tech firms are after the same people.

“Half my job is maintaining a mental Rolodex of people that are at various places,” Mr. Zawadzki said.

Edwin Lee, 40, is typical of the candidates that many ad tech companies are competing for. Mr. Lee, an economics major at Stanford who has a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Southern California, was hired as an account director at MediaMath in September. He came to the company after leaving a Silicon Valley start-up and began his new job after entertaining a variety of options, including other small start-ups and Google.

“For me it was like, ‘The world’s my oyster here — what do I want to do?’ ” said Mr. Lee, who describes his new job as “helping companies and clients make sense of something they don’t really understand and they hear a lot about.”

The difficulty in finding qualified candidates is affecting advertising agencies as well, said Jerry Neumann, a venture capitalist from Neu Venture Capital who invests in ad tech companies like 33 Across and YieldBot.

Agencies have not traditionally hired for skills like “number crunching, data visualization, quantitative analysis,” Mr. Neumann said. “They’ve never needed those in the past.” Instead, media buyers and even those on the creative side of agencies need to prepare for a new digital reality.

“The kind of media buying that’s happening now is much more quantitative” Mr. Neumann said. “The agencies are staffed for qualitative.”Instead of coming up with one grand idea, new digitally adept workers in creative fields should be able to devise multiple ways to execute an idea. For example, a variety of Facebook ads can be devised, then tested on the fly to see which appeal to consumers, Mr. Neumann said.

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The increasing ability for marketers to put specific ads in front of specific viewers at specific times, whether on mobile devices or personal computers, also creates a need for employees who can conceptualize and execute simultaneous concepts. Mr. Zawadzki said the future for creative talent would be “to come up with thousands of ideas, put them out there and see what works.”

Jennifer Seidel, the executive vice president for agency relations and membership at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said agencies that were more general in their focus were having a harder time attracting talent with deep digital or quantitative skills.

“Part of it is to get people to recognize that it’s a viable career choice,” Ms. Seidel said. To that end, the trade organization hopes to have a Web site soon that will feature the range of people with nontraditional skill sets who work at advertising agencies. They have also formed a committee to address talent gaps at agencies and to offer training seminars for members.

Ms. Seidel and other ad tech executives said outreach to universities was also critical.

“Colleges and universities are not teaching the skills they need to survive in this environment,” said Doug Weaver, the founder and chief executive of the Upstream Group, a company that provides digital training to publishers and agencies. While some universities have advertising and marketing concentrations, “the traditional media sales or ad skill set was not built for this,” Mr. Weaver said. “You need a hybrid.”

Some agencies, like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group, have put formal training programs in place. Its program, called Ed, began last July and has offered more than 100 classes on everything from “field trips to Facebook,” said Allison Kent-Smith, director for digital development at Goodby. Ms. Kent-Smith said employees were trained in areas like interactive design, social media, HTML and coding languages like CSS.

“You have to get very close to technology,” Ms. Kent-Smith said. “You have to get your hands in it.”

The Ad:tech conference will be held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan from Nov. 8 to 10, and will include a panel on how marketers can build a digitally skilled “brand dream team.”

But panels and training may not be enough. Erika Weinstein, president of the executive recruitment firm Stephen-Bradford Search, said the bigger issue for agencies trying to fill the talent gap was managing the grand expectations of what these new employees were expected to do.

“Something has gone terribly out of whack in looking for realistic talent,” Ms. Weinstein said. Many companies are looking for “a five-headed monster,” focusing on creative and highly technical skills and a strong business acumen. Agencies, Ms. Weinstein said, needed to “get realistic not only about what they want from the candidate, but what are they going to offer.”

By TANZINA VEGA

What Does It Take To Be a Social Strategist? [INFOGRAPHIC]

2011-10-30T16:11:00.001-07:00

Looking to break into a social media career? Here’s pretty much everything you need to know about the job and the people who do it every day. Nearly 80% of corporations use social media, so there’s plenty of opportunity for aspiring strategists — especially as the other 20% get on board.

Step 1: Get a Twitter account — 100% of social media managers represented in the survey have one, and you have to know the lay of the land if you’re going to innovate and build a brand on said land.

Step 2: Be ready to wear many hats. When it comes to social media, there’s a lot to tackle, including crafting actual posts, analyzing metrics, training and managing a team, spearheading campaigns, working with agencies and managing a budget.

Want to know if you’re cut out for it? In the infographic below, you’ll see the personality traits, education, career paths and responsibilities of today’s successful social media strategists. Statistics were pulled from LinkedIn data, job listings for positions in the field, and a report by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

SEO Manager at TIG Global in Chevy Chase, MD
Project Manager at OMD in New York
Web Developer at Design at Work in Houston

Infographic courtesy of Web Strategist and Voltier Creative

September 24, 2011 by Lauren Drell

Artists’ Logos Show Reach and Hostility of the Web

2011-10-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

Few personal journeys can shed as much light on the age we live in as the one traveled by Jonathan Mak in the last week.

Jonathan Mak

Jonathan Mak's Apple logo with silhouette.

Raid71

Chris Thornley's Apple logo.

Mr. Mak, a university student in Hong Kong, went from being an unknown aspiring graphic designer to an Internet sensation after an image he produced spread rapidly across digital platforms after the death of Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.

Mr. Mak’s design of a silhouetted profile of Mr. Jobs in the Apple company logo was shared across the Web and reported by media. And then, nearly as fast, Mr. Mak found himself being vilified.

With a speed befitting the technological age that Mr. Jobs helped usher in, Mr. Mak became the subject of derisive Internet postings and negative media reports. His design, it turned out, closely matched one produced earlier this year by Chris Thornley, a British graphic artist.

“It’s been a very overwhelming experience,” Mr. Mak, 19, said by telephone between classes at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. “I still attend classes and lessons as usual. But as far as following my assignments, it’s been difficult.”

Mr. Mak said he had developed his design in late August — a white Apple logo on a black background, with a black silhouette of Mr. Jobs indented in the apple — as a tribute to Mr. Jobs after he stepped down as chief executive of Apple.

Mr. Mak said he had searched across the Internet both for inspiration and to ensure he was not copying another design. He said his searches had not uncovered Mr. Thornley’s design.

He then posted the tweaked Apple logo on his blog. Mr. Mak also said he asked the public to alert him if they spotted similarities between his work and others.

The design lay quietly on his blog for weeks until Mr. Jobs’s death on Oct. 5.

“Overnight, my Web site went from getting 80 responses to tens of thousands,” he said. “At first I was very happy.”

But by the weekend, Mr. Mak said, people told him how similar his design was to Mr. Thornley’s, which had a black Apple logo on a white background, with a white silhouette of Mr. Jobs at a slightly different angle.

Mr. Mak said Mr. Thornley’s wife, Julia, notified him Sunday night about the similarities.

In the world of graphic design, such similarities are common, said Juliette Cezzar, director of the communication design program at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. But Mr. Mak’s case showed how easy it has become to unearth similar images or outright copies.

“If we were living in a different age, it would take weeks, maybe months to discover copies,” Ms. Cezzar said. “Now it can take 24 hours. That is a good thing.”

In a statement, Mr. Thornley said he had followed the controversy while receiving treatment for a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He said he had first developed his design in May “because I wanted to celebrate the fact that someone who had cancer was still working, still driving forward and still thinking positively about the future.”

Mr. Thornley, a 40-year-old living in Darwen, England, acknowledged the dangers the digital age presented to creativity.

“The Internet can be a double-edged sword,” he said. “You need to use the Internet in order to promote yourself, but in order to do this you are making yourself vulnerable to these situations.”

Mr. Thornley said he hoped to speak with Mr. Mak soon.

By KEVIN DREW - NYT

A version of this article appeared in print on October 14, 2011, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Artists’ Logos Shows Reach And Hostility Of the Web.

REPRINTS

Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Post/Rant/Manifesto

2011-10-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word “hardened interface” a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon’s vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon’s dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:

- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.

- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You’d never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says “oh yes, I’m fine”, it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say “I’m fine, roger roger, over and out” in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it’s indistinguishable from automated QA. So they’re a continuum.

- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups’ code via these services, then you won’t be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can’t have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.

- debugging problems with someone else’s code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.

That’s just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they’re not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don’t even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they’re still afraid of that; it’s pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they’ve come to understand that it’s the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it’s the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

That’s what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn’t (and doesn’t) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.

You wouldn’t really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they’d built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel’ o’ other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

The other big realization he had was that he can’t always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn’t use the goddamn website. It’s not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn’t really matter, because nobody’s mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I’ve just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.

I’m not really sure how Bezos came to this realization — the insight that he can’t build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn’t matter, because he gets it. There’s actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It’s called Accessibility, and it’s the most important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you’re sorta thinking, “huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?” then you’re not alone, because I’ve come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn’t been able to get through to you yet. It’s not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there’s more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

So yeah. In case you hadn’t noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I’ve worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you’ll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.

That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of them. Stubby’s great, but it’s like parts when you need a car.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: “Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us.” Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn’t need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I’m saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It’s incredibly frigging obvious. Except we’re not doing it. We don’t get Platforms, and we don’t get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don’t “get” much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it’s staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can’t design for squat, but at least they’re doing it.

Amazon gets it. Amazon’s AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It’s embarrassing. We don’t have any of that stuff.

Apple gets it, obviously. They’ve made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft’s, and have been since time immemorial.

Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate… plussing, or whatever it’s called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it’s a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it’d be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I’m insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.

After you’ve marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn’t look because I didn’t want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It’s like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Please don’t get me wrong here — I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They’re kicking ass as far as I’m concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.

I’m just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where’s the Maps APIs in there for Christ’s sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were… they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it’s all snouts and horse hooves.

And also don’t get me wrong about Google+. They’re far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.

Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs — Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it’s hard for them to get funding for it because it’s not part of our culture. Maestro’s funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it’s a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they’ll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they’re not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they’re not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn’t even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook — that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such — is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I’m a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We’re not arrogant, by and large. We’re, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post — if you’ll reach back into distant memory — by describing Google as “doing everything right”. We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we’re arrogant it’s because we didn’t hire them, or they’re unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They’re inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn’t let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I’m actually going blind. For real. I’ve been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they’re quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you’re blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.

It’s not just them. It’s everyone. The problem is that we’re a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal — our search, that is — and that wild success has biased us.

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

Microsoft started out as a platform, so they’ve just had lots of practice at it.

Facebook, though: they worry me. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I’m not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.

Maybe they just looked at us and asked: “How can we beat Google? What are they missing?”

The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don’t do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don’t do external ones. This means that the “not getting it” is endemic across the company: the PMs don’t get it, the engineers don’t get it, the product teams don’t get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn’t matter one bit unless we’re treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can’t keep launching products and pretending we’ll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We’ve tried that and it’s not working.

The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don’t know how to wrap this up. I’ve said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I’m sorry if I wasn’t gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we’re actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I’m sorry.

But we’ve gotta start doing this right.

Steve Yegge

Relax. Enjoy.

2011-10-09T12:37:00.001-07:00

Click on photo until it opens in own page. Pretty sweet gif.

Facebook Timeline: There's Plenty That's New

2011-09-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

At the f8 developer conference today, Facebook unveiled some major platform changes that will profoundly affect how we use and interact with the site. In his keynote, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's job is to "make it the best way to express who you are." And with a company whose vision is to make the world more open and connected, it's absolutely essential to make it feel like a place you prefer to spend time.

In doing so, Facebook has introduced the Timeline - something of an online scrapbook - that better categorizes and highlights your actions, rather than the current Wall of everything. The new system will summarize your events and actions over time, so that only the significant things remain. New Reports apps will group things together in a sensible way and the entire experience will be more visual.

There are three major concepts that make up the new Timeline: all of your stories, all of your apps and a new way to express who you are. Here's the video that Facebook released to help you see how Timeline will transform the thing that you share:

While the more significant things will be grouped into these apps, your less interesting updates and actions - Zuckerberg called them "lightweight actions" - will be visible through the Ticker on the sidebar. But what's even more interesting (to me, at least) is that there will be a social aspect to the apps: if you visit a friend's Timeline and see an app that interests you, you'll be able to instantly put it on your own.

There's a New App in Town
The significant advance on the app front is that the Open Graph will allow for "a new class of apps," according to Facebook. These apps will all have three things in common:

Frictionless experiences: no longer will an app interrupt your activity to ask you if you'd like to share it. If you authorize an app, your actions will automatically be posted. For example, if you authorize Netflix or Spotify, the movies you watch or songs you listen to will be automatically posted.
Realtime serendipity: the good news is that we're already doing these things; the Open Graph is simply going to allow people to see more of what we do and allow people to connect on common interests.
Finding patterns: over time, the graph will recognize the things you do and begin grouping them together, making the Timeline a much more organized structure.

As you can imagine the "frictionless experiences" will range in their nature. Currently, you can only "like" something on Facebook. But the new Open Graph apps will essentially function like verbs. Anything you can do can become an app. For example, your timeline will show that you "Read" a book, "Watched" a movie, "Listened" to a song, "Ate" at a restaurant, etc. The possibilities are endless. As Robert Scoble said to some venture capitalists last week, "you are now funding verb companies."

The New Timeline

So, let's take a look at how the Timeline works and what comprises it. First, if you haven't already, please take a look at the Introducing Timeline page on Facebook. It beings with your Cover - a large image that acts as something of a digital welcome mat for your visitors. It's meant to be the first impression that you make. Next up is Stories - the photos, posts and events that are important in your life. You can control which are shown and highlighted by starring or hiding content. And finally, Apps tell the world about the things that you regularly do - those verbs that I mentioned above.

There are already a number of pundits who are analyzing, summarizing and hypothesizing about the changes. My role here isn't to do any of that, but rather to share with you what the changes are and why you need to be aware of them. Here are some good backgrounders to look at for more detail:

Mashable's Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need to Know
Francine Hardaway on Fast Company looks at What the New Facebook Changes Mean for Businesses
And if you're interested in getting the new Timeline now - rather than waiting for Facebook to relese it over the next couple of weeks, take a look at CNET's How to turn on your Facebook Timeline right now for a step-by-step tutorial.

Here's what my new Timeline looks like:

Based on what I've observed so far, here's a major concern I have for any Facebook Pages (i.e., businesses or brands): the casual behavior of fans around your Page and your content (liking something or commenting on something) will now become relegated to the sidebar Ticker. For the average user (who has between 130-170 friends), it may not be a big deal; but for anyone over that number, you'll see a constantly updating stream of actions that are less meaningful now because of the lack of context of each. And there have already been lots of conversations about how to kill the Ticker.

At this time, it seems that Facebook is focusing more on relationships between individuals (rightfully so, as that's the main reason the platform exists). But even as AllFacebook.com wondered "Does Facebook's News Feed Punish Advertisers (Yet)?" you have to wonder how Pages will fare. So much of the activity there fed into individuals' news feeds; now that will be relegated to the Ticker. It sounds like it's a win for Facebook in terms of getting brands to step up to the table with some advertising budgets.

In my opinion, the more forward-thinking brands must do one or more of these three things:

Advertise. Begin thinking about Facebook's offerings and determine how you want to fit into the ecosystem.
Create engaging content. There's no question that if you create good content - both on and off of Facebook (let's not forget that Facebook should be only part of your overall social media strategy) - people will naturally want to share it, which means it will end up in the newsfeed eventually.
yourself. Along with that content, you need to think like an action verb. What is it your brand does? Make a verb out of that and hook it up to the Open Graph so people can announce on Facebook that they're engaged in activity with your brand outside of Facebook.

Whew!

That's a lot of information in one post (and let's not forget the Google+ update two days ago). The new interface is probably overwhelming for the average user. In fact, one of my friends saw the video above and said, "OMG I am going to have to take a 300 level course in Facebook..."

What do you think of the new changes afoot at Facebook? Likely to keep you more engaged, or something a little to extreme for you? How do you think businesses will fare in all of this?

~Scott Monty

PMWarner Communications

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A version of this article appeared in print on October 14, 2011, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Artists’ Logos Shows Reach And Hostility Of the Web.

Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Post/Rant/Manifesto

Relax. Enjoy.

Facebook Timeline: There's Plenty That's New