flights

I can’t believe I’m writing about Britney Spears, but bear with me.

One would hope that Britney bottomed out somewhere around the head-shaving or the crotch-flashing. Now it seems the gossip mill’s coverage of Britney has finally bottomed out as well.

Yesterday I was in the checkout line at the Safeway – where I get most of my celebrity gossip – and I noticed the usual array of Britney shots on the covers of the usual magazines. But something was amiss.

The normally snarky Us Weekly had Britney’s face dominating the cover, but instead of the obligatory jab about her latest booze binge or child-endangerment episode, the headline simply read, “Living With Mental Illness.”

Adjacent to this on the shelf was Star magazine, whose cover story was something about how Britney and K-Fed are working to come up with a parenting agreement that will be good for their kids.

All of this on the heels of the recent South Park episode (“Britney’s New Look“) lampooning our insatiable appetite for tabloid news. Key quote, “I know watching celebrities go down can be fun. Me and my friends were just as guilty as all of you, but maybe, just maybe it’s time to let this one go.”

Amazingly, the tabloid press is listening, and it seems they’ve agreed to a ceasefire.

Of course, Craig Fergusson called for it a long time ago.

I was reminiscing with my colleagues yesterday about the dawn of the ATM machine. We were remembering how, when banks first started to install them, they all used to charge you a small fee for the convenience of using it – whether you belonged to the bank or not. Thankfully, banks abandoned this practice, although many will still charge you for using an “out-of-network” ATM.

When I was in Singapore doing some consulting for Singapore Airlines, they weren’t really down with the whole e-ticket thing. Labor is cheap in Southeast Asia, so travel agents are still the main outlet for sales of airline tickets. One of our initiatives with Singapore Airlines was to expand their e-ticketing capabilities, and we had to repeatedly push back on their desire to demand a convenience fee.

We poked fun at notoriously-stingy Singapore Airlines about this behind their backs. It all seems so archaic, but I still occasionally run into service fees here and there – like when I buy baseball game tickets online, as I did today.

So let’s get this straight… I’m making things more convenient for you, so you want to charge me a fee.

Actually, I suppose it’s more convenient for both of us, which is apparently a problem. So your fee is designed to counter-balance this dangerous increase in net convenience?

Just like the “patriot” act, this “convenience” thing isn’t fooling anyone. Let’s come up with a better name for your fee.

How about simply, an INconvenience fee? Maybe a We’re Sorry fee? Sucka fee?

I can barely remember now, but before the age of MapQuest (and, subsequently, Google Maps), if I needed to go somewhere I’d never been to before, I rarely planned my route. If, for example, I wanted to go to a furniture store in a suburb on the other side of town, my process went something like this…

1. Get in the car and start driving in the general direction of my destination.
2. Once in the general vicinity of the destination, consult a map or get exact directions from a knowledgeable human.

This makes perfect sense to certain kinds of people, but various of my friends and past significant others found it absolutely maddening. How can a person get in a car and start driving if they don’t know exactly where to go?

I was thinking about this today in the context of product development. Recently, I wrote about the value of “process,” and I think this makes for a pretty good analogy.

The Web is a very forgiving platform in the sense that building things for it is very easy, and making changes is often trivial. It’s all just pixels and code. I love this because it allows for experiments and mistakes. It encourages mistakes, because you can learn and adjust so quickly.

I have no problem putting something imperfect into the hands of the crowd and then watching it to see how and where it falls short – within reason. If the breaking of something will result in loss of life, or a lot of money, I’m very very careful of course, but such situations are rare.

I have no “brand” to protect – or, rather, a willingness to experiment is consistent with my “brand” – so this is easy for me.

What’s really difficult sometimes, though, is to get clients and stakeholders to feel comfortable with things unfinished and imperfect. Companies are understandably careful about everything they unveil that has their mark on it. When careful goes too far, however, one pitfall is a culture of fear, where people are afraid to make mistakes or deviate from what is safe and known and familiar. This is the same kind of culture where people are unwilling to deliver bad news to the boss.

Not to venture too far into another analogy, but I once had a music teacher say to me, “if you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud.”

I love this philosophy, but to make it work for a company or a client requires certain controls. Some options are…

• Brand it with beta. This is a popular Web 2.0 approach. Just put a “beta” badge on it, and people will know it’s a work-in-progress.
• Launch a laboratory. Google and Digg have pretty nifty public ones.
• Encourage your employees. There’s no encouragement like time and money. Google, again, is the obvious example. They famously encourage their employees to use 20% of their time to work on side projects. Some of these – like Gmail – have become key parts of Google’s portfolio.
• Limit exposure. Create a panel of people with whom you can share your wild ideas and works-in-progress. Or do live A-B testing, where the experimental stuff is only put in front of people who meet certain criteria.

That’s four ideas, and there are certainly lots more, so get in the car and start driving. Make loud mistakes.

(to the editors at the New York Times)

Dear Sir:

An editorial in the Times, April 5, observes that “a decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve this ongoing quarrel” between two contending views: that “the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently,” and that “a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth.” There has also been a third position: That apart from its prospects for success, the United States has neither the authority nor competence to intervene in the internal affairs of Vietnam. This was the position of much of the authentic peace movement, that is, those who opposed the war because it was wrong, not merely because it was unsuccessful. It is regrettable that this position is not even a contender in the debate, as The Times sees it.

On a facing page, Donald Kirk observes that “since the term ‘bloodbath’ first came into vogue in the Indochinese conflict, no one seems to have applied it to the war itself — only to the possible consequences of ending the war.” He is quite wrong. Many Americans involved in the authentic peace movement have insisted for years on the elementary point that he believes has been noticed by “no one,” and it is a commonplace in literature on the war. To mention just one example, we have written a small book on the subject (Counterrevolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda, 1973), though in this case the corporation (Warner Brothers) that owned the publisher refused to permit distribution after publication. But quite apart from this, the observation has been made repeatedly in discussion and literature on the war, by just that segment of opinion that The Times editorial excludes from the debate.

Sincerely yours,
Noam Chomsky
Professor, MIT

and

Edward S. Herman
Professor, University of Pennsylvania

I want to like, Hillary Clinton. I really do.

She’s an accomplished and well-regarded senator, and she’s the only First Lady in my lifetime who tried to make a meaningful contribution during her tenure in the white house.

I want to like her, but she’s making it really hard.

In her presidential campaign, she could choose to focus on her strengths and her many accomplishments. Instead, she keeps inventing stories, revising history, taking cheap shots and insulting our intelligence.

In the last two weeks alone…

• She invented details about her Bosnia visit and then insulted our intelligence by claiming she simply misspoke (um… misspoke dozens of times?)
• She’s taken great pains to make the case that she’s always opposed NAFTA, despite copious evidence to the contrary.
• Responding to calls for her to drop out of the race, she charged that Obama doesn’t want to give Pennsylvanians their chance to vote. It doesn’t rise to the level of the “plagiarism” allegation, but it’s still a cheap shot, considering no such calls have come from Obama or anyone on his staff.
• Finally, when a reporter asked for her to comment on the recent gains Obama has made in the superdelegate count, she feigned ignorance, claiming she doesn’t pay attention to those numbers.

Even if you take her at her word, is this the kind of leader we want? I don’t know about the rest of America, but I’m done with cheap shots. I can’t take any more sniping. And I know it was just one of those obligatory remarks, but if Hillary isn’t paying attention to the superdelegate count, then there’s something seriously wrong with her. The superdelegates are crucial to the outcome of the most important contest of her life. We want her to be paying attention to that.

The narrative the media has painted about Hillary is that she will do anything, absolutely anything, to win the nomination, that she doesn’t have the capacity to put the party or the country ahead of her own ambitions. This is probably unfair, but she hasn’t done a whole lot to dispel this impression.

As a result, she has completely alienated young voters – a constituency that has always favored Obama, but I have to imagine there was a time when they might have warmed to her. At this point, however, judging by the Digg crowd (a skewed lens, I admit), they are passionately anti-Hillary. This is a pretty powerful segment of potential voters, and it’s unfortunate that she has failed so badly with them.

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm – like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly – or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times – and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise – or unrealistic – to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

I’ve just been reading some Jeff Jarvis’ recent posts about Senator Obama (like this one), and it’s a clear reminder that even a lot of smart people will ultimately cast their vote based on a general gut assessment of the candidates.

I don’t know where Jarvis sits on the political spectrum, but he dissects and parses Obama’s speech along all the same lines as the stream of other conservatives who criticized it. Jarvis makes it very clear that he doesn’t want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt – which is fair. But like the other pundits who criticized Obama’s speech, Jarvis takes some pains to manufacture the doubt.

The bottom line seems to be that people who see the world in very black and white terms (not speaking of race now) didn’t like Obama’s speech. Black and white thinkers need to push things toward one end of the spectrum or the other – a thing is either right or wrong, good or evil, us or them. These are the “J” types in Myers-Briggs. They wanted Obama to disown or denounce pastor Wright, because Wright is clearly a wrong-headed person.

Maybe conservatives tend to be “J” types, because conservatives tend to frame things this way. Tax cuts are good. Illegal immigrants are bad.  There’s an axis of evil, and these countries are part of it. Black and white thinkers don’t appreciate people who push things toward the middle, who try to highlight complexities and nuances. They think these people are weak, equivocating, slippery, untrustworthy.

Gray area thinkers are the “P” types in Myers-Briggs. We (yep, I’m a “P”) see black and white thinkers as crude, simple-minded, judgmental, prejudiced. We were exuberant in our praise of Obama’s speech because we’ve had eight years of Bush. Yes, we’ve had it. Had it with his brand of black and white thinking. It was refreshing to hear a politician talk about something in honest terms and not try to boil it down to right and wrong.

Obama loves a man who is deeply flawed. He has striven to understand the nature and origin of the man’s flaws.

Who among us is not flawed? Who among us hasn’t loved someone who is flawed? I don’t know about you “J” types out there, but we “P” folks understand that everyone is flawed.

My stepfather had a mean streak in him. He used to call me a “fag” (among other things) when he got angry, because I liked to draw and paint and cook, and because one of my high school buddies sported an earring. He pushed my mom around a couple of times. On the other hand, he taught me a lot, gave my family a lot.

He was a guy who’d had a really rough life in some ways, a guy who’d been deeply hurt and betrayed a few times. Understanding this about my stepfather helped me dismiss his verbal abuse and put it in its own box, so to speak. Should I have dismissed (or disowned) him and not just his abuse?

That’s not how love and family and friendships work. Anyone who thinks these things are black and white is kidding himself.

‘h’ is for hypocrisy.

If the premier selling point of a hybrid vehicle is fuel economy, then you have to wonder why Lexus won’t reveal how economic the 600h actually is. This information is nowhere on the Lexus website or in most of the 3rd party reviews.

It took me some digging, but I did finally find a review that addresses the fuel economy of the 600h and as you might guess from all the secrecy, it’s not great. In fact, Lexus estimates the 600h will only get about 20mpg in the city, which is just 4mpg better than the non-hybrid LS 460. Bad, but not terrible for a big luxury car I suppose. But how about the fact that the 600h will only get 22mpg on the highway, which is worse than the 460. All this for $110,000.

The bottom line is the 600h is a stupid novelty designed to help limousine liberals feel better about themselves. And based on the latest Lexus commercials – where they make the ‘h’ out to be a kind of badge of moral superiority – they seem to know it.

Two thumbs way down Lexus.

A couple of times in my career as a User Experience professional, I’ve worked for bosses whom I considered to be ridiculously (some even dangerously) incompetent. One recent boss would stroll in at 10 am and leave at 3 every day. Even during his limited hours, we rarely saw him, and I can’t remember him pushing a single initiative or idea in the years I worked at that company.

At a busy agency chock full of brilliant, hard-working people, he seemed to maintain a low profile and accomplish nothing. Nevertheless, he was promoted twice while I was there, and shortly after I left, he was promoted once again – this time to the highest-profile User Experience position in the company.

He mastered his career without doing his job. We’ve all worked with people like this, and they’re easy to dislike. Their singular skill is building alliances with people who can affect their career trajectory. They might appear to have a low profile, but they are determined in their back-channel dealings. The worst of them are passive-aggressive and two-faced, never missing an opportunity to take more credit for something than they are due, or stab someone else in the back.

How to recognize them
In job interviews, they spend an inordinate amount of time haggling for more salary and better titles. Once they’re hired, they take full advantage of executives’ open door policies. They figure out which ones they can manipulate, and they spend a lot of time behind closed doors with them. Eventually, this extends to lunches, golf outings and more, where they have ample opportunity to spin stories of their own greatness and the incompetence of everyone else.

What to do about them
If they have cast their spells on the right people, there’s not much you can do. If you work at a company where the execs are fooled by people like this, then update your resume and move on.

What to do if you’re one of them
If you’re one of these people, then you don’t know it. You think you’re awesome, and although most of your colleagues can’t stand you, the ones who can help your career are in your court. Congratulations.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who excel at their jobs but struggle to move onward and upward in their careers. In fact, being great at your job can almost guarantee career paralysis. Your company won’t promote you because it would mean replacing you with someone inferior. On the plus side, these people are much more likable than the back-stabbing, two-faced good-at-career people. You just feel a little sorry for them (or yourself, if you’re in this category) as you repeatedly watch less-qualified people zoom by in the passing lane.

Sometimes these people are vindicated – Al Gore didn’t secure the presidency, but he eventually won an Oscar – but you can’t count on it. And, come to think of it, an Oscar pales in comparison to the most important job on the planet.

How to recognize them
They are the go-to people for solving actual business problems, so their names come up all the time in ad hoc work conversations and meetings – often preceded by “go ask…” These people are in high demand, and they’re always busy with actual work.

What to do about them
If you’d like to see them get that well-deserved promotion, then sing their praises in conversations with key people (the same ones the good-at-career folks are always having lunch with). Be specific about the role you can see them stepping into.

What to do if you’re one of them
You probably know you’re more skilled and more qualified than the people who’ve passed you by, and you’re a bit baffled. You need to get on the radar of the people who can take you places. Start acting a little like the leader you want to be. Figure out how to delegate some of your busy work, then carve off a meaningful bit of your boss’s job for yourself – with his or her blessing of course.

I didn’t see Obama’s landmark speech today, but I read the transcript. I admit I was moved by it, and although there was certainly a practical or tactical element to it – in the context of his presidential chances – I think it’s important to look past that and consider his actual words.

I wish CNN agreed. Unfortunately, the whole focus of their coverage was to discuss whether the speech would work, and by “work” they meant only whether it would put to rest questions around Obama’s association with pastor Jeremiah Wright. They used Rush Limbaugh’s response of all things, to raise doubts, as if Limbaugh’s response wasn’t determined before the speech was even made, as if Limbaugh at this point is anything more than a washed up, irrelevant joke on the outer fringes of the media, preaching to an ever-smaller choir.

They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will remind us that individuals are complex, that the issue of race is complex, that none of this is black and white – in any sense of the phrase. They didn’t talk about whether the speech would “work” in the sense of whether it will help us shift our attention to more concrete and ultimately solvable issues like the economy, healthcare and the environment – where people of all races share the same concerns.

It’s bullshit cynical coverage CNN, and you will lose more and more of your young audience as long as you pollute the airwaves with this kind of crap. No amount of fancy touchscreen infographics and talk of “liveblogging” will change that fact.