Category Archives: Reflections

Memorial Day, Draft Lottery, Reality TV, Flags

Current Affairs, Reflections, True Stories, , , ,

(This was first posted here last year.)

I woke up yesterday in Portland (OR), in a condo near the top of W. Burnside. The area has a series of cemeteries, dark green rolling hills, breaking up the otherwise thick forested landscape. It had rained all night, so there was a thick mist cushioning the quiet hills. It was early Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, not a lot of cars around, very quiet. Through the mist I could see the U.S. flags dotting the graves on the hills. Random patterns. A lot of the graves have flags today.

Later in the day we drove by, commented on the flags. How many from this century, Afghanistan, Iraq? Hard to tell. They’d be so young, somebody said.

Whether they died in 1943, or 1969, or 2007, they were all so young.

Switch to reality television. 1969. The draft lottery. They put the 366 possible days of the year in transparent plastic eggs, one each for each possible birthday. The put them all into a giant transparent barrel like we see in lotteries these days. They spun the wheel. They drew a date. Those of us born on that date got a number.

My number was 243. I didn’t get drafted. I didn’t go to Vietnam.

By 1969, most of us opposed the Vietnam war. We talked about what we’d do if drafted. Al became a conscientious objector, emptied bedpans for two years. I was engaged to be married, but that was not going to get me out of the war. But a January birth date did.

It turned out later that somebody did a statistical analysis on the draft lottery and the dates. They started on January 1 and threw them in from there day-by-day to December 31. The later birthdays tended to be on top. Or so I read later.

But we didn’t oppose the people, our peers, who fought. Whether it was their choice, or not.

Few in my generation chose to go to war. One who did, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, chose ROTC. Traveling around Europe, he collected military paraphernalia. His father was in the army. His grandfather had been in the army. He volunteered to be a helicopter pilot, and he died in Vietnam. In his helicopter. We weren’t that close, I heard about it later. My memories of him are of a 20-year-old kid having a wonderful time during a year in college abroad, laughing, drinking Austrian beer, learning; as alive as any memory could be. What a terrible loss.

Memorial Day, patriotism, flags, wars. Protests, anti-war, opposition. Memorial Day isn’t about war, or politics, or patriotism, or whatever might be the opposite of patriotism. It’s definitely not about flags. It’s about young people who died, and the people left behind who loved them. And all the people who endured it, risked their lives, went through the hell of it, for whatever reasons.

I lucked out. I won the reality TV of the last half century, the 1969 draft lottery. And I thank God for that. And honor and respect the ones who went, for whatever reasons. And hope that we can end the present war without causing chaos, and more death and suffering; and that we never fight another war again.

Is It Just Me, Or Are Things Are Picking Up?

Current Affairs, Economics, Reflections, Starting a Business

Seems to me like the recession has hit bottom and the economy is starting back up.

It’s not just sales at our company which are picking up. It’s also people I know and talk to, like the other 24 investors in my angel investor group which met last week; most of them are business owners. And people at the local Chamber of Commerce and Small Business Development Center.

Yesterday I did the business plan section at a quarterly day-long SCORE workshop on starting or running a business. We had twice as many people yesterday as three months ago and six months ago.

I’m sure it’s going to be a long, hard, climb back up. We can’t get around the economic impact of so many people out of work, so many home loans in trouble, and so many people’s paper wealth worth a lot less now than a year ago.

Still, at least I think we’re starting to go up instead of down.

Reality Check: Beauty, Women, Distortions

Marketing, Reflections, , , , ,

I picked this up while browsing Seth Godin’s recent post over the weekend. He had it here, as part of a riff on the new world of commercial advertising on YouTube. Good post too, but I ended up thinking this Dove commercial on YouTube deserves special attention.

(If you don’t see the video, click here for the YouTube source.)

I assume you’re aware of how much we distort the supposedly ideal beauty in women. I am. But we forget. This is a bad thing. It hurts people, both women and men, and we should remind ourselves frequently.

Silly Things We Do with Job Titles

Reflections, , , , , , , , , ,

Something new in this year’s flock of business plans is the CSO: Chief Strategy Officer.

Hah! The silly things we do with business titles. When I started in business way back when — actually the 1970s — we had the president of a company and vice presidents. Or so I thought. The more sophisticated companies had senior vice presidents. Below the vice presidents, if you cared about it, there were directors, then managers, then supervisors.

Then we got the CEO and COO, the chief executive officer and chief operating officer. And then, more recently, the other “C level” titles including CFO, CTO, CIO, and CMO (for financial, technology, information, and marketing). My impression is that CEO, COO, and CFO emerged as popular titles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, CTO came next, and the CMO is more recent. It used to be “VP Marketing” and of course Senior VP Marketing, now it’s CMO.

I’m starting to see references to “C-Level” people as part of the registration or admissions process for events. Here I thought sea level was a measure equivalent to no altitude, but C-Level means lofty heights. Sort of.

I was delighted to have the CEO and COO convention exist two years ago when I chose to change management of my company and name Sabrina Parsons CEO, and Noah Parsons COO. That was very convenient for me. I’ve been president of Palo Alto Software since I started it. I was president and only employee for a long time. So the CEO convention made it easy for me to keep my title but make it clear, at the same time, that somebody else is in charge. She’s the CEO. I report to her. And I don’t envy her the job description either, I’m much happier with mine: my interpretation of president these days means blogging, writing, teaching, and speaking. She runs the company.

So I’m amused by the business plans I see lately, in which these startup companies have only three or four people, but they are all C-Level people.

I’m particularly amused with the title CSO, or chief strategy officer. When I first started in business, the CSO was the client service officer, which was a sales position, reporting to the VP of sales.

I’m tempted to change my title: I want to be CBO, for chief blogging officer.

Branding as Soul, Karma, and a New World

Business Ethics, Green Business, Reflections, , , ,

The boom in social media, my happy association with some very smart Generation Y people, and a good book or two (Me 2.0, among them, and Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz) have me very intrigued with a broader application of branding.

I was taught to think of branding as a collection of visuals that should work together: logo, letterhead, signage, packaging, business cards, newsletters, websites.

More recently I’ve started to see it as something much deeper than look and feel; something as core to existence as identity.

  • With an individual, it’s the you that you and the world create together: not just your resume, not just you as you are for your family and friends, but you as you appear to others on the web, in your writing, the way you dress, your behavior at meetings, the way you speak, the way you deal with other people.
  • With a company, there too it’s what you and the world create together. Aside from the obvious trappings above, it’s your location, your space, the way you treat customers and employees, the decisions you make about pricing and service and product development, decisions you make about finance and investment and payments and receipts. It’s your accumulated integrity or (heaven forbid) lack of integrity.

Several religions incorporate a consciousness of a soul or something like it, that carries a person’s life deeds around on it like a permanent record. I was taught a Roman-Catholic-in-the-1950s version that had to do with sins as stains on the soul. I see it now as more of a Zen-Karma-like thing. But those two, and your idea of the same, don’t really contradict each other.

And I like that idea as it applies to companies, particularly your company and my company, small businesses, and personal businesses. Every small decision you make, every interaction with customers, every product detail, every financial transaction, is your brand. Cut corners, cheat people, stretch the truth, and it changes your identity as a company. Your accumulated brand, over time, isn’t what you say it is; it’s what you actually do that affects people and the world.

I am not just asserting as true something that I’d like to have be true. I’ve seen it in business over and over again. And I see it more than ever, these days, with the new business landscape making our businesses more transparent every day. Reviews, tweets, comments, it’s all something like word of mouth but magnified, like word of mouth cubed.

You want proof? Me too. All I’ve got so far is the increasing evidence that green environmentally and socially conscious companies do better on the stock market, in the long term, than the opposite. And lots of anecdotal evidence about companies that treated customers well, or badly, and were paid in kind.

Does the News Business Die Along with Newspapers?

Current Affairs, Journalism, Reflections, , , , , ,

In the olden days, when I was a grad student in Journalism, for instance, or a night editor for UPI, the business model of the news business was fairly clear:

  1. News organizations sold advertisements.
  2. They needed news to get readers to be able to sell the ads.
  3. News needed credibility to get the readers.

So we had a news business.

We tend to forget the factor of volume, as related to credibility. Newspapers, and later, television news, had to appeal to a mass audience in order to make a living. That helped us generate a news ethic, such as objectivity — covering the news, trying to keep opinion out of it.

News was never really objective, of course. But there was the goal of objectivity. As journalists, most of us tried to be objective. And when we weren’t being objective and we knew it, we tried to make our bias clear, and label the content something different from news.

“Yellow journalism” was about sensationalizing the news. And it was always a problem, back in those olden days. Some media did it more than others.

News values changed with the growth of television news. The business of selling ads got better with more audience, and the audience liked celebrities, violence, puppies, and things that could fit into 30-second spots.

What we didn’t imagine, back then, was the splintering of the audience into different interest groups; the impact of having 600 channels on the television, and millions of websites. That changed the business entirely, and we — not just the journalists, but the world at large — haven’t figured that out yet.

Specifically, what does that mean? Well, to start with, now you can make a good business being the blatantly conservative television cable news channel, for example. You don’t have to appeal to a cross section; you appeal to a segment. And you can do the same as the blatantly liberal blog/news source.

So what does this mean for news?

Loving and Hating Twitter, in 5 Easy Pieces

Baby Boomer, Reflections, Technology, , , , , , ,

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, Twitter is to instant messaging (IM) … and then some. You can follow me on Twitter as Timberry. I’m like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don’t get it, you’re too old) — I’m 61. But that’s nothing: my 89-year-old dad is on Twitter too.

Consider this picture of Twitter usage published earlier this month on TechCrunch:

Something’s happening there.

1: Vocabulary

But first, some vocabulary (just to get it straight): Twitter is web publishing in 140-character snippets. A tweet is one of those snippets. To tweet means typing those snippets into Twitter. To follow is what you do (takes a click) to get access to somebody’s tweets. A follower is somebody who follows you. To retweet means to take somebody else’s tweet and tweet it again, giving them credit, to your followers. Your followers can also be called tweeps, or sometimes tweeple.

Is it all too cute? Avoid the now-famous Stephen Colbert gaffe with the wrong verb.

2: I Hate Twitter

About Twitter backlash. The Daily Show take on it, Samantha Bee ignoring the interview while peering into a cellphone keyboard, was hilarious. The Twitter Facebook users accuse it of twitterizing itself.  The Google search for “twitter bashing” turns up half a million hits. “I hate Twitter” is good for more than 18 million.

So here are some good reasons to hate Twitter:

  1. Twitter clutter. The “I’m having dinner now” or “I’m going home now” inanities. I did that too when I started, as if I were telling family members “arrived in Denver airport.” I get it now: Nobody cares what you’re doing. Tweet something interesting, or nothing at all (note to self: and don’t try to make cute contractions for Twitter clutter. Doesn’t work.)
  2. Twitter selling. Ads are ads, even at 140 characters per tweet. Infomercial I don’t mind, when there’s actual info — happens a lot — but there is selling going on. (The good news, though, is that you only get that once. Don’t like it? Stop following. A lot like changing the channel. If you don’t follow them, they don’t bother you).
  3. Tweeting at meals, in conversations, or at meetings or movies or events is really annoying.
  4. Tweeting while driving is at best stupid, at worst, manslaughter.
  5. People collect followers. The more, the better. The Twitter version of counting friends in Facebook. Now we have some Web applications designed to get you more followers. Ugh. People measure themselves and compete on number of followers.
  6. It’s really distracting. It gets in the way of getting things done (of course, that’s actually a good thing disguised as bad; the same would be true of everything fun or interesting except work).
  7. I hate it that Steven Wright, the comedian, master of the one liner, isn’t on Twitter (that’s a good thing too, because maybe he’ll start.)

3: I Love Twitter

Consider this an enthusiastic hooray for relationships in 140-character snippets. Crazy as this sounds, ironic indeed, but some of my Twitter friends feel like real friends to me. When they tweet their latest blog posts, I go, I read, I comment. When I tweet my latest blog posts, they go, read, and comment. They recommend me to others. I recommend them. I ask for recommendations, they respond. Sometimes it’s just “I liked your last blog post” and sometimes it’s “does anybody know a restaurant in Portland that does Thanksgiving dinner?”

I blog a lot these days. I care about other people in the same general topic areas. It’s nice to follow them on Twitter.

So, then here are some good reasons to love Twitter:

  1. Keeping up with some professional relationships. I know that seems incredible, more so if you knew me. I’m kind of a hermit. I hate cocktail parties. But I like keeping up with people in Twitter.
  2. Fascinating real-time constantly scrolling updates on interesting new blog posts, news, issues. I follow some people whom I respect, and they point out interesting ideas, posts, etc. I work in tweetdeck, and it’s like having a scrolling world of interesting little tidbits.
  3. Writing. Sometimes good writing. Good tweets are amazing. See number 5, below.
  4. Publishing. Think of it as publishing short snippets to people who want to read them.
  5. Someone’s tweets get repetitive, or become sales pitches, or just Twitter clutter? Unfollow them. It’s as satisfying as changing the channel.
  6. Taking responsibility: people with real names and real pictures. You can’t delete a tweet.
  7. Maybe Steven Wright will get on Twitter in the future.

4: Twitter in Business

Seems like almost everybody on Twitter is a social media marketing expert offering to show the rare non-social-media-marketing experts how to make money on Twitter. Seems that Twitter can be good for people in the expert business. But is it good for business? Or, the question of the last month or so, are you an idiot if you’re in business and not in Twitter?

Twitter is no more good or bad for business than telephones, letters, conversations, or pies in the face. The medium isn’t the message; the message is the message. I have lots of twitter friends who are straight, like it, keep in touch with it, and — lo and behold — that’s good for their business. But is being in Twitter good for business? Nope.

I can’t figure out Twitter and relationships. It’s oxymoronic, and, sometimes, just plain moronic. But it brings me closer to blogging and Web people I like and respect. Paradox, I suppose.

5. A Few Good Tweets

At its best, it really is writing, and a new kind of self publishing. For evidence, I call on David Petheric (clarocada on Twitter) and his post Top Tweets of 2008 on DigitalBiographer.com. He gets the credit for the collection, and I’m choosing just a few:

  • brandmilitia: Sometimes the fastest way to screw up a company’s social media strategy is by letting the marketing department run it.
  • chrisbrogan: Just made a VC choke somehow on my speaker’s fee. Tough times for startups in 09, kids.
  • copyblogger: I’ve got to go on a carriage ride through Highland Park tonight with 4 kids and 3 lawyers. This is why God gave us scotch.
  • boris: “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” — Jorge Luis Borges
  • SaraD: Accidental Death & Dismembership Insurance. I passed on that. I choose Membership.
  • mathie: I need a pair of headphones. Or a shotgun and at least 5 cartridges. Or an office of my own.

There: see what I mean? Good stuff. It reminds me of something that came over the teletype 38 years ago when I was on the night desk at UPI in Mexico City. Rumor had it he put this onto the service and walked out for good. His tweet, 38 years ahead of its time, was:

“Too much work, too little money. I quit.”

And, what the heck, my favorite tweet from my 900-some tweets:

Gray cold comfort. Clouds pressing the forested hills downwards, covering the tops. Ghosts of holidays past. Western Oregon in November.

I felt poetic that day.

Conclusion: a quote from an NBC web story about twitter:

The nicest thing about Twitter might be that it’s a grassroots medium nobody has quite figured out a way to make money off of yet. Not even the guys who created it.

To Define Success, First Define Failure

Entrepreneurship, Reflections

It took me a couple decades running my own business before I realized that everybody in their own business should step back, every so often, and define success. It isn't obvious. Some people want business growth, some want recognition, some want independence, some want to stay at home, and some want an office to go to. People are different.

Then I realized, that at least in my case, a lot of what I did in going on my own and then, later, building that into a business, was about avoiding failure.

Does that seem weird? Still, I think it works for a lot of people. Think about it.

  • Failure is missing payroll. Running out of money. Closing the doors.
  • Failure, for most people, is destroying a relationship. Working all day and all night, constantly irritable, rationalizing, that you're doing it for him or her or them. While you slowly lose him or her or them.
  • Failure, for most people, is not having enough money to pay the mortgage, buy the kids shoes, do something different on weekends, the occasional vacation, living.
  • Failure for some people is not making it big, not getting financed, not getting acquired.
  • Failure for some people is not being rich or famous.

I went out on my own, quitting a good job, because I wanted to do the work (planning, market research, in my case) instead of supervise other people doing the work. But as I did that, it wasn't exactly doing what I wanted; it was doing what I wanted without hitting the failure alarms of any of the first three points above. The fourth and fifth didn't matter that much to me.

So what was success? I suspect, in retrospect, I defined it as not failing. Doing what I like, spending the day working on things that interested me, and, as time went on and the company grew, in a friendly office with people who shared the vision and were fun to work with, but without running into any of those first three failures.

Does that make sense? I wonder if I'm the only one.

The New Web: Your Money or Your Life

Reflections, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Your thoughts, your pictures, your daily life … maybe it’s your journal, or your diary. Do you own it? Should you? Facebook backed down last month when people said its user agreement gave it ownership of users’ pictures.

Anita Campbell started me thinking about this yesterday, with her post on digital sharecroppers.

Is your life on Facebook? Twitter? Your blog? Or, perhaps, this question instead: who’s making the money?

Facebook makes money off the ads it puts on your page. Twitter intends to make money some day; in the meantime, it builds users.

When I post on this blog, at least, my writing is mine; and the ads you see here are for my own work. When I post on other blogs, like Up and Running, or Huffington Post, I get satisfaction, somebody else gets ad revenue. What about your blogging?

Me? I’m okay with it. Facebook and especially Twitter feel to me like I’m connecting with friends, I like it, I do it on purpose, and I’m not concerned with protecting rights or intellectual property. Actually I’m grateful for the platform. My blogging on the big sites gives me a voice, and that’s worth it to me.

How about you? Is it working for you? It’s a question worth asking.

Richard’s New Rules and Page View Paradox

Reflections, Web/Tech, Weblogs

Now here's a good rule to live by:

1) Do unto others as you would have them announce to 100,000 people you have done.

I had seen this one a couple of days ago on the Huffington Post, part of Richard Smith's 10 new Golden Rules for Living in a Web 2.0 World, a thoroughly enjoyable list. Good advice for a not-so-big world.

But wait. What if there's a corollary? You do unto others nicely, as implicitly suggested above, and nobody will announce anything to anybody, because that's boring. Do something dumb, mean, or otherwise embarrassing, and that will spur an announcement. We should call that the page-view paradox of Richard's rules.

Remember the old saying, "Nice guys finish last?" Bad news travels fast, and good news doesn't. Bad reviews are more fun to read than good reviews.

I still remember the line in a movie review, from 30 years ago, where the reviewer said the director had "delusions of adequacy." Panning is more fun than praising. I don't remember lines from good reviews.

I looked back at this and Richard's rules today after I read Michael Arrington's startling spit-in-the-face story on TechCrunch. Which, I should add, I had found because somebody I follow in Twitter commented on it with the phrase "you reap what you sew (sic)." Gulp.

Arrington, clearly still reeling from the unnerving experience of having such a vivid expression from someone he didn't know at all, says he's going to take some time off, and think about it. He tells of death threats a few months ago, and expensive security.

TechCrunch, the blog, and Michael Arrington, its founder, play a king-maker role in high tech. A good review on TechCrunch can make a company suddenly real. A bad review can hurt, but even that's better than no review at all. Arrington's in a tough position, in my mind. He can't do what he does well without disappointing a lot of people. I don't know him, but I've seen him perform, I've read his work, and I feel for his dilemma. You can't do a job like his well without making enemies.

And in his case, it's not even a matter of bad reviews: the worst thing TechCrunch can do to an aspiring new company is nothing at all; there is no news worse than no news. In other words: silence. That's a tough world to live in.

Which brings me to two more of Richard's suggested golden rules:

9) The day your name hits the top of the Google search rankings will NOT be a good day.

10) It is more compelling than ever to simply do the right thing for yourself and for the world. Positive actions have now been gifted with incredibly long tails.

These two go together because rule 9 is a restatement of the page-view paradox. Bad news is far more interesting than the opposite; and the opposite of bad news isn't good news, but rather, no news. So that contradicts rule 10. Damn! I want to believe that positive actions are now being gifted; but I don't see it happening. At least, not often.

It was about a generation ago that Thomas Harris' book I'm OK-You're OK was a best seller. It pointed out (among other things) that two random people sitting together on an airplane seat were far more likely to start talking by sharing the negative (these planes are always late … these seats are too small …) than anything positive. This seems to be a general rule. And it relates to the power of the negative in blogs, reviews, and general human behavior. We are all pretty annoying, you have to admit.

So I wonder. I get it that the new world can turn out and expose phonies and cheats faster than ever. But don't they — the cheats and phonies and all — get more page views too?