Getting it wrong and still be loved

Paul Graham dwells on a hierarchy of disagreements.  Sarah Perez gives it a web twist.

I recall Tim O’Reilly in this old post recounting a story from a speech by Charlie Munger, a long time associate of Warren Buffet.  That story elucidates knowledge gained by rote and the one got by conscious labor. 

I quote -

“After winning the Nobel Prize, Max Planck went around Germany giving talks. His chauffeur heard the talk so many times that he had it by heart, and so one time, he asked Max Planck if he could give the address. Planck agreed, they changed places, and the lecture came off famously. But then came the Q&A, with the very first question being one that the chauffeur had no hope of answering. The chauffeur replied: “I’m surprised to hear such an elementary question on high energy physics here in Munich. It’s so simple; I’ll let my chauffeur answer it.”  

Munger went on to point out that what went wrong in oversight of Enron was a lot of chauffeur knowledge, great ability to give a presentation, but no deep knowledge.

As Graham says -

“the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier…..Most people don’t really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can’t help it.”

To those haters of discord, I would just say this.  Most bloggers that we know are amateurs. They must entertain dissent while canceling those that go over the edge. Readers don’t expect professional quality in their output. So just they need be tolerant of dissent and be grateful to acknowledge a mistake when pointed out.  They can of course outwit a scathing comment by adding a dose of humor.  But never try to get around that by pleading you were way too busy and wrote in a hurry.  That makes you look like a stinking orifice.  You may well be one but why that secret be made public knowledge?  

Admit ignorance where you were. You need not be  Dr.Samuel Johnson for that! .

Having Greenspan for company

Most rules of public speaking or norms of even simple conversation urge us to stay away from jargons.  I for one don’t think I can remember all those rules, much less act them out.  When I speak, I am busy collecting my thoughts in tandem, test their adequacy so that the listener is put in context, apply emphasis where necessary and liberate them in a simple vocal exercise. Where do rules figure in this mind-mouth scamper?

Yet I think of occasions when jargons came in handy.  It helps me compact my sentences amongst people that liberally use them. Saves me and the listener lot many words, long winded explanations. Sometimes it effectively helps parrying questions that are uncomfortable to answer or are totally out of context or even irrelevant.  Few inquirers have the chivalry to admit ignorance and persist.  If they do, I throw more jargons at them. Signal their cluelessness and convey it’s just beyond them. Wear them out.  They’ll soon find something better to do.

Now I find from this article Alan Greenspan used this tactic to avoid answering questions when testifying before Congress !!! 

I am no great fan of Mr.Greenspan.  But it feels good to know I have his company

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Not just in India

If you think I’d been particularly hard on Guy Kawasaki for blowing the Steve Ballmer interview yesterday, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet !

Here is Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy going onstage with Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) and completely botching it up. I thought it’s just with the snooty woman interviewers of CNBC-TV18 in India that cut off famous people and butting in with their flirty lines. Ms.Lacy is several notches below though.  Clearly, they are not quite ready for prime time. 

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis gives a fantastic low down here on how (not) to conduct onstage interviews..

I watched that video and a few things struck me. If not knowing her audience has been her error of omission, she committed another horror in assuming that they knew her - in the process mistook Zuck’s audience as hers. She imbibed an osmotic vision of hollow personal grandeur commensurate with that of the person sitting opposite. She comes around as a naturally bad listener and the result is of course, predictable. She blew it. 

Somewhere in the interview she could’ve salvaged it by turning the mic over to the audience.  She blew it again by angrily reacting “Let’s go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule.”  That did her in, completely. 

The audience was unusually forgiving till Mark prompted her to ask a question. I understand they just blogged and twittered over this egotistical boor.  But will she ever realize what a chop she’s been?  Her response after the fiasco (rough video) says the opposite.  For starters, she could cut that narcissistic giggle out.  If she still doesn’t get it, a sex change is all that’s left   

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Dumbasses clamor for online privacy

Emily Gertz has an intriguing post in her blog on the limits of online anonymity.  She questions the right of those in public office to claim anonymity over the internet and their right to put forth the violation-of-privacy argument if they are tracked down and outed.  In her own words “Just as the internet can help create more transparency in government, it provides officials opportunities to spout off as they wish while ducking responsibility.”

I go that the right to online privacy (not data security) is over hyped.  Those who clamor for it are the ones that can’t handle transparency.  They use fake user id or go under pseudonyms. It’s like asking for privacy while wanting to be in the cloud. Internet is a cloud. If you take flight, you would be in the radar screens. All that you can do to protect your privacy is to keep mum or stay locked in. Cyberspace is hardly the turf to tread on and then claim privacy. It’s free for all out there. You will be tracked down easily if you do something that’s hackworthy.  Hackers have your prick in their pocket and you are too blind to see it.

You invariably leave a trail and there’s nowhere to hide except by getting lost in that crowd. That multitude, in itself is your guard - you will not be noticed unless you stand out.  Spin that theory and you get - only the exceptional get noticed online.  I could use a familiar nude beach metaphor here. We don’t look at anything that moves in a nude beach, do we?  Our eyes feast on truly gorgeous, sculpted bods.  They die to get noticed there.  They punish themselves all year round to look great in that beachwear on the day.  If you don’t want to get noticed, you’ve no business to be there.

Learn to handle online publicity.  Tweak it to your advantage. Speak your mind and craft your unique online persona that you can never do offline because you get only a few fleeting moments of attention.  Offline distractions are far too many (you could get nervy) and you are not sure of leaving great impressions. Get a good online headstart and follow it up by offline touch and feel.  That’s how you get larger than life. The only risk here is, you are exposing to get kicked in the butt by some smartass.  Have enough humor to absorb it and gain wits enough to riposte.  That way you build a circle, if not relationships, with people you like.  Be smart and use them to your advantage.

Much as many hate it for its laissez-faire, I love the Net exactly for that. I figured it out early on and said to myself - if it leaves a trail for others to find me, why not use it ingeniously for saying “I am in this business. I’d love your custom” on the sly?  I think that’s cool.

My normal tactic is to break in with some riveting comments that make people that matter take notice. It makes a statement of what I am and what I do, for a living.  My aim - to get me some interesting enquiries that could later turn into deals. My greatest win has been Trevor, my brilliant channel partner from NYC, that no recruitment ad would’ve ever gotten me. He told me he never looked up job ads – he tracked all my four blogs, some comments in other blogs and sketched my persona.  Eventually he felt I’d just be the right one to work with. He says he isn’t worse off for that and my deal book has several credits to his name!

When you go asking for orders, you get squeezed. The clients that come calling after experiencing me online, pinch less on the price I quote. They either give me their business or they don’t.   Since my comments have always been sharp and direct (I don’t bother to euphemize for fear of diluting my intent that weakens the punch – and now it has become my signature and style!) it leaves them with little doubt what they are letting themselves in for.  It obviates a lot of pre-deal feel-ups. Who will give so much PR mileage across the world and FREE?

In summation, my business would’ve remained a non-starter but for the pubilicity I got over the Net.  The other alternative was to carry on in a 9-5 cube farm and slog for some dumbass. I did that for a couple decades and Enough ! 

Right to online privacy, still anyone? I say, “No, thanks.”

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What a week…

Had one helluva’ stress box for a week. Diligencing Indian companies with unbending UK consultants will give you anything but that (you have to understand and explain business processes on both sides – they come up with way too many why’s – before nodding in agreement).

First two days were hell. Then they acquiesced and unwounded as they realized things are just different, not so much to worry about. I asked them how they can do global business if they stay so stiff. They conceded it is much easier to do business anywhere but UK, where everything is questioned. They’ve become a victim of local context. So much so that almost half of the UK’s company directors and senior managers believe that even a plummy or posh upper-class accent is now a hindrance rather than a help when it comes to succeeding in business.  Earlier, in Britain, merely speaking with ‘the right accent’ was a prerequisite to rising in the business world.  They have now all but gone, although being an effective communicator is still paramount.

I was really surprised but then I could find some good reason. The rise of the UK’s self-made men and women, often from working-class backgrounds, such as BHS boss Philip Green or Ryan air’s Michael O’Leary, reflects the changing profile of the successful boss. These are people who aren’t afraid to speak their minds, and are proud to make a virtue of the fact that they have worked their way up from humble beginnings to positions of influence. In both cases though, they are better known for their forceful and charismatic personalities than for their class origins.

I might as well use this occasion to pay homage to Dame Anita Roddick, of Body Shop fame, pioneer of green capitalism and fair trade. By the time she sold the business last year to L’Oréal for £652m ($1.1 billion), of which she received £118m, Body Shop had 2,000 shops in 53 countries.  Farewell Anita, wherever you are…

The Duke of Wellington may have thought that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but today’s business leaders of U.K were clearly educated elsewhere…

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“It’s just something you gotta do”

A guy called James Somers, student of Ross School of Business at U/Michigan, Ann Arbor convincingly takes B-Schools apart by a telling post. Excerpts –

“…..It was clear from the first few minutes of lecture that the business school got what it asked for: friendly, busy kids with mediocre math skills. The accounting class was like any other, though it crawled along, and exams were simple rearrangements of the practice tests;

We learned what took 45 minutes in my Econometrics class in an entire semester. We spent three weeks discovering that flipping heads with a fair coin three times in a row has a probability 1/8.

There was no rigor - for instance, when we learned the basics of optimization we were told to visually solve problems by moving a sloped line away from the origin and note where it hit the other lines, rather than tackle a system of equations or (aha!) do simple calculus. All the while we were told that what we were doing related to business through oversimplified case studies where we served as consultants to Firm A. Using the word “Science” in this course’s title is insulting.

If you’re rigorous, answering not just the how but the why, you can get even remedial kids to do great things; if you only hit the surface level, if you only teach procedures, you make everyone a monkey.”

I’ve read this book “What they don’t teach you at Harvard” by Mark McCormack… But Mark just stopped at filling some of the gaps - the gaps between a business school education and the street knowledge that comes from day-to-day experience of running a business and managing people. 

I know Mark’s been a lawyer and did not go to Harvard.  Good that he didn’t.  If he had, he would still be writing….

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The cover’s blown

It’s not uncommon to hear about fake orgasm or even iPhone, but Fake Steve Jobs…?  Bit far fetched. I thought it was about some laser technology that attempted a 3D animation of the founder and CEO of Apple Inc. 

At long last, someone has cracked one of the technology world’s biggest mysteries — the identity of Fake Steve, a sharp-tongued blogger who had tech aficionados in stitches with a satiric diary purporting to be from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.  In a story published on Monday, Brad Stone of the Times outed Dan Lyons, a technology editor at Forbes, as the author of ”The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” a daily account of events in the tech industry as seen through a caricature of Jobs.

I liked the way he (“FSJ” -as Lyons calls himself) rips into all new media tech sleuths as he says – “One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.” Both FSJ and Brad Stone are from staunch bastions of Old Media, Forbes magazine and The New York Times.

I’d never visited this blog before FSJ’s cover was blown.  Just read a few posts and found it hilarious. Thank you, Brad Stone for having led me to it.  

The best part is where FSJ coins the symbolism “Brad” - for what he did to him –  brad, v.i.:

1. To bust a fellow filthy hack without mercy and spoil the fun for everyone, in a quest for personal aggrandizement.

2. To urinate in a pool. 

Let’s ask OSJ (Original) himself  “When was the last time you’d bradded, Steve ?”…