A Tribute

The title of this post reminds me of the Tenacious D song of the same name. I want to offer a tribute to someone who mattered a great deal to me, and who left me with the most valuable legacy--a sense of my place in the world, an abiding belief that I am a writer, and that this isn't a crazy career choice. But when I try to come up with the right way to express all this, it seems that the real words are already gone.

Just as it happened for the guys in Tenacious D, who while playing for a demon that was threatening to eat their souls:

And we played the first thing that came to our heads,
Just so happened to be,
The Best Song in the World, it was The Best Song in the World.

But later, when they tried to remember it, they couldn't. And so they wrote another song, which was a tribute to the first song, which they had forgotten.

So it is with me. The picture above is of my grandmother, Madlyn DeWitt, who died one week ago, on July 16 at the age of 91. She was much more than just a grandmother to me. She and my grandfather raised my sister and me from the time we were very small. This was the result of a number of forces, not least the fact that it was the late 1960s and my parents were pretty far gone into the boho world of the hippies and beatniks of the Lower East Side.

My grandparents turned out to be pretty darn good parents, all things considered. Madlyn was my first--and my best--editor. She managed to simultaneously support my creativity, while giving me heavy duty lessons in grammar and sentence structure. Later, I knew the rules so well I was able to play with them. Turn them into games for my mind. She also taught me that great writers are usually great readers as well. She didn't have to tell me this. The evidence was all around me. In the evenings, rather than turning on the TV, we generally all settled down to read. There were books of course, but also many mysteriously erudite magazines to choose from--The New Yorker, something from England called "Punch," and many others. For years, all I could really read were the cartoons, but eventually I found myself delving into those long articles--the ones that went on in tiny black print for page after page--and was amazed to discover that there were other people who wrote like my grandmother spoke.

She wasn't a known writer, but she had her moments in the sun. For four years, from 1972-6, she was the editor of a tiny literary journal that became something of an insider's secret among what my uncle has termed the "literati" of our local area, called The Barrytown Explorer. She contributed many of the articles, and her style--a combination of witty bon mots and sincere appreciation--captivated the audience, which ballooned during her tenure. She managed to wangle contributions out of any and all good writers in the Hudson Valley, including the celebrated writer Saul Bellow, who was spending some time there, and New Yorker contributors of the time who maintained homes there.

Many of my recollections of those early years of my life involve the sound of my grandmother click-clacking away on her Underwood manual typewriter--she couldn't think, she said, when using an electric, because there wasn't enough time between each key stroke. To this day, anything that sounds like that keyboard sends me back to age five. I sometimes hovered outside the door of her office, playing with my toys in the hallway, and listening to something that sounded like what I knew would be my sound when I was a grownup.

I wrote my first book at age six, when I was confident enough in my writing abilities that I figured it was time to start publishing. Madlyn never treated me like a little kid when I was involved in such serious matters. She helped me staple the pages together, and gave me a few suggested edits to the text of the story, which was called "The Big Gum Chewing Boy." I was, at the time, obsessed with bubble gum, because Madlyn didn't allow it in her house under any circumstance. It was both a forbidden fruit and something I could stand in judgment on others. And so the book told the story of a boy who partook of this sinful item, and was punished with the loss of his mother. (Yes, I now see the significance.) In the end, the gum actually saved him. He used it to fly away and get home.

Madlyn was of a time and place that doesn't exist anymore. She made jokes that required you had a provisional grasp on at least three languages. Mealtimes were for serious conversation. Either you kept up with the adults, or you stayed quiet. When you were done, you had to ask, "May I be excused?" My sister and I honed the phrase until it was uttered so quickly it became one word, "MayIbexcused?"

Madlyn was passionate about politics. She expressed this through an intense and vocal opposition to the Vietnam war. But there were other more subtle ways that she revealed her political views. For example, if we had soup, we were all allowed to pick it up and drink it directly from our bowls, because "Mrs. Roosevelt" did that. Later, she was actually hired by the Roosevelt Library to write books commemorating the centennials of both Franklin and Eleanor (Mrs. Roosevelt)--a chance to express her gratitude and respect for a presidency that was as personal to her as the Kennedy administration was for a later generation. I wonder if I'm inheriting this, as I find myself feeling a personal connection with the Obamas in a way I wouldn't have expected.

Her passing is a personal loss to me. And, as so many of her friends are saying, it also feels like the end of an era.

Corporate Anarchy?

In the last few posts I've been developing an idea that has been rattling around my brain for some time now. It can be summed up in the following questions: Is the social media revolution we're experiencing right now a result of new technology, or is it the other way around? In other words, is the quiet revolution sweeping through our society in response to new technology -- or, this new way of communicating something that we have called into existence? Could it be that the rise of Twitter and Facebook and Friendfeed are a reflection of people's desire to break down the old barriers and speak directly to one another? Are we seeing the end of the "expert" era, in which all knowledge and understanding is filtered to us through a select few?

It seems to me that this is a generational thing. My parents generation, the children of the 1960s, started some kind of revolution. It was in many ways a flawed attempt. As the writer Ken Wilbur has pointed out, for all its good intentions, the boomer generation was immensely narcissistic. It had (and still has) a tendency to blow its accomplishments up out of proportion. And it was very much still stuck in an "us/them" paradigm. In fact, the whole idea of a generation gap is based on that! However, there's no denying that our parents generation -- with their anti-war protests, long hair, and rebellion -- shook up the old order for good and all.

Then came my generation - Generation X. We were a bit lost for a time. They called us slackers, because we tended to be introspective. We couldn't exactly rebel, because our parents had already done that, so we kind of came up with our own way. When I was in college, I took to calling myself an anarchist. This was partly to annoy my parents and professors. But it was also my way of showing my dissatisfaction with the dual options that were being served up as my only choices -- Democratic v. Republican, Left vs. Right, Women vs. Men, etc.

Now, there's a new generation--I believe they're calling it Generation Y. They seem to evolved a whole new stance. It's as if they have taken the best of the boomer generation and my generation, and melded them into something entirely new.

They're not rebelling. They're talking. And, lo and behold, no one is left out. It may have started on the campus of Harvard University, but now Facebook is open to all. Even Walmart has a page (though many of the wall comments aren't terribly kind).

The new generation seems to intuitively understand something that for all its free love, the hippies never completely got. That is, we are a human family -- all of us connected to one another. When we try to deny it, we experience the opposite. Alienation. Loneliness. Anger. All of the things that seem to ail our society today.

The great marketing guru Seth Godin (who I generally like and agree with) showed himself to be stuck in the old paradigm with a recent post, "You Matter." In it, he lists all of the situations that show that you matter. They were all very heartfelt. For example:

"When you love the work you do and the people you do it with, you matter ... When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter."

The list goes on. However, the new paradigm is as follows: "Everyone matters. Period." You could be having the crappiest day ever, and feeling no love whatsoever for your fellow man. You could be a protestor on the streets Tehran. You could be a tech startup struggling to get noticed. Or, you could be Apple.

No one is left out of this. Everyone matters.

(To be continued...)

The People Factor - What you Must Know to Succeed

In my last post I talked about two stories making the tech news rounds that both suggested that human interaction is hugely important to business. This may seem obvious. Businesses are, after all just collections of people when you come right down to it.

However, what I really think we're seeing is a massive consciousness shift. This is happening at the same moment that social networking is taking hold worldwide, connecting people in ways we never could have imagined. It may be that social networking brought all of this on -- or it could be that it is a by product of a societal change. Either way, it is here, and it's going to make or break your business.

I've started calling this the people factor. I'm somewhat borrowing from marketing guru Robert Middleton on this phrasing--he talks about the "contribution factor," which is an important personal barometer for business success. So, how does the people factor play out?

Here are some examples.

James Andrews, an executive at Ketchum flew to Memphis to meet with a big big client, FedEx. When he arrived, he tweeted the following on Twitter: "True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” An executive at FedEx happened to be following his Twitter feed. He was about to pay someone to come up with a brand strategy for FedEx who was insulting its headquarters. And Memphis isn't just any city as far as FedEx is concerned. It's the place that has nurtured and supported FedEx from its humble beginnings in 1973, when it supported a fleet of 14 small aircrafts, to its position today as a market leader in shipping.

Had some newbie to Twitter made this mistake, we could call it ignorance, but this was a man whose job is to usher people into the digital age. His moniker on Twitter is "key influencer" and his new venture (he has left Ketchum) is as a social media strategist. Let's hope he learned his lesson well -- and it's not a bad idea to heed it ourselves.

Another example -- this one on the positive end of the spectrum -- is my client Ocarina Networks. A Silicon Valley startup, they are a brand new entrant in an industry that is, by high tech standards, fairly entrenched and traditional. They were going to have to make a splash, or they'd be in trouble. Their product is truly innovative and useful -- they shrink down files to a fraction of their former size, thus saving on storage costs -- but that's not enough anymore.

Our approach was to make social media a significant portion of the overall marketing and PR strategy--and the client was completely on board with this idea from the start. A little over a year later, there is immense buzz around the company. When people talk about data deduplication -- a major news item recently in light of the battle between EMC and NetApp to acquire deduplication pioneer Data Domain -- they almost always mention Ocarina as well. It is on the map, as they say. How did we do this? We didn't just broadcast or blare out the story. We talked to others about it. We made Ocarina part of the conversation by conversing -- and this includes that key activity known as listening. The results speak for themselves.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself. Am I listening? Am I part of the conversation, or just sitting on the sidelines? Am I patient enough to use social media as a way to connect with others, or am I rushing ahead to try to get the "pay off" by treating it as a way to trumpet my company's offerings?

Culture Clash

Here are two stories that are getting a lot of ink this week. They appear unrelated on the surface, but in fact they have a lot in common and could be a sign of a larger trend.

First: the open letter that EMC CEO Joe Tucci sent to the employees of Data Domain, which it is bidding with its rival NetApp to acquire. In it, Tucci reassures them that their new parent company would respect their company culture:

"We are very mindful of culture—respecting and preserving the various cultures that made the companies we acquired successful in the first place. In nearly every instance, after joining EMC, these businesses have grown faster, advanced the development of their technologies more rapidly, reached more customers, and provided greater career opportunities for their people than they had been able to do on their own."

However, some observers can't help but position the battle between EMC and NetApp for ownership of Data Domain as a battle of east coast vs. west coast culture, such as in this article on Enterprise Storage Forum.

Second: Another topic that is making the rounds this week is a new study showing that the top 10% of Twitter users are creating 90% of the content. In addition, as TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld reports, a greater number of followers correlates to a larger number of tweets on a daily and weekly basis.

What this really means, says Schonfeld, is that the types of people who are actively involved with Twitter are also the ones that others want to follow and pay attention to--not a huge surprise if you think about it. However, the numbers are starker than one would originally suspect.

While many have taken these statistics to mean that Twitter is mainly about "broadcasting" rather than "interacting," in fact, the numbers don't really tell this story at all. If you look at some of the most active Twitter participants -- Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and many members of the storage community -- what you find is that they themselves are very interactive with their followers.

What's the connection between these two stories? They both show that business is really about people more than anything else. Whatever you choose to describe as "culture," it's clearly very important to us, and will sometimes even take precedence over considerations such as revenues and per share price. With the rise of social networking, this may be becoming more true--and it may be more democratic and transparent than ever.

Note: this post appeared in a slightly different form on my client blog, Online Storage Optimization.

The NYT Gets ... Happy?

How many of you have noticed that there is a new section in the online edition of the venerable old New York Times? It's called "Happy Days." The reference isn't so much to 70s TV but to a decision by the paper's editorial staff to explore the question of happiness during these dark economic times.

Here's the description:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

OK I admit it - my first reaction to this was to snicker. The economy takes a little dip, and suddenly these otherwise blinkered, east coast elitists wake up to the fact that money isn't all there is in life? And what will happen when the banks regain their footing? Will everyone trash any thoughts of happiness and just jump back on the hamster wheel and start running after coin once again? I also wondered, cynically, if perhaps this was the newspaper of record attempting to hang on to an audience by any means necessary in light of the meltdown the media industry is experiencing.

I was also just a tad annoyed by the list of writers. Not that I'd heard of most of them, but they were so obviously gleaned from a list of "experts" in the most western sense of the word. Had it escaped the notice of the NYT that there is a 5000 year-old tradition that was built on understanding the question of human happiness? That tradition (or religion, if you like) is called Buddhism, and as it happens one of the greatest thinkers on happiness from that tradition is alive today. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has written a number of (New York Times) bestselling books on this very topic. Now, perhaps they couldn't get him, but perhaps a scholar of his works would be in order? They could've even gone with a solid, New York intellectual such as Robert Thurman, Columbia professor and author.

However, as I read through the posts, I started to melt. These are pretty heartfelt and insightful. Yesterday's, for example, gives a beautiful description of what it felt like for Rousseau as he sank into the moment while rowing a small boat on a lake in Switzerland. In the comments field, many pour out their own stories of what it is like to snatch moments of bliss, joy, contentment and the like.

And under my own cynical reaction, I realized, there is a yearning to see just this kind of thing reflected in our news media. So much of it is caught up in the worst elements of our existence as humans. In fact, the spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle tells us that if we want to understand the kind of damage that the ego wreaks on our society, we need only watch or read the news to find out. And so, with that, I've decided it's not such a silly thing for the New York Times to try something a little bit different--to write about life from the perspective of our highest selves for a change, rather than continually aiming low.

What do you think?

Credit Crisis Confessional

One of the most talked about articles of the week is from the NYT Magazine. In "My Personal Credit Crisis" economics writer Edmund L. Andrews unravels his tale of financial woe. It's a poignant and well-written piece that mirrors the trap so many Americans fell into during the housing bubble.

There are a number of odd things about the story, as some have already noted. One is that the writer claims to have a yearly income of $120K, plus NYT stock to cash out for a down payment, yet for some reason was bringing in less than $3K/month. This just doesn't add up.

True, he was on the hook for $4K a month in alimony and child support payments. However, it's still amazing that he was only left with $2777/month, as he claims in the story. Alimony expenses come out pre-tax, and so he should've been left with $6K/month. With so many dependents and two mortgages he ought to have qualified for plenty of tax breaks. So let's say worst case he is out 30% in taxes. That should've left him with at least 4,200/month, and probably more. Maybe not enough to afford a half million dollar house, but his second wife also had full-time work most of the time--some of it quite well paid.

Then there were the fights and recriminations with his wife over her spending. Yet, when he enumerated the types of expenses they had, they hardly seemed excessive. Contrary to his own self-flagelating description of it, the beach house expense wasn't all that over the top--it was $1,600 total for him and the kids. Other than that, they bought some clothes and food. They didn't refurnish their house--in fact, they brought in all their old stuff. And from the way he describes it, they didn't do much to renovate the place, either--just the opposite. They let it go to seed.

So, what was really going on with Mr. Andrews? Part of it, I'm going to guess, is that there were other expenses involved that he is not copping to in this article. Perhaps they will be more fully explained in the book. Or maybe he'll continue to gloss over them, in which case my trust in this narrative will slip even lower.

Of course, what makes the story juicy and ironic is that we're not just talking about a common shlub. This is an economics reporter for the venerable New York Times. In other words, if anyone should've known better, it was this guy.

But wait ... wasn't everyone reporting that housing prices were likely to keep on rising? Aside from a few notable naysayers, this sunny outlook was the norm. If anything, an economics reporter would be even more prone to subscribing to this point of view. Not that it should be this way, but human nature being what it is, this is hardly a shocker. Not only that, but he probably got used to thinking in very big numbers--billions and trillions. In my own small way, I experienced this as well. Reporting on Silicon Valley for Red Herring, I began to talk about "millions" as if they had very little value.

"Oh, they were only funded at $5 million," I would say, not really hearing myself.

Another angle on the story is that much as it is written in a highly confessional style, the author has done a good job avoiding some of the obvious questions about what kind of person he was, and is. What was his attitude towards money over the course of his life? What drew him to dedicate his life to writing and thinking about money? Perhaps he had oh, I don't know, a few small hangups about it? Just a thought...

When he described his cold sweat panic attack over money, I couldn't help thinking that maybe what he needed to do first was to take a step back and examine his responses. Panic attacks are their own type of affliction--and they often hit us in situations that others might not consider worthy of panic. His wife's reaction seems to support this. Of course, we can now step back and judge her to be the one who was in denial, but was it really that healthy for him to torment her about every little expense? Was it spending that took them down, or an overall unhealthy relationship to money on both their parts--his especially?

Anxiety tends to pursue us through our lives. If we dispense with one trigger, we find (or create) a new one. In short, this was a very psychological journey that he was experiencing--maybe even a spiritual one.

Again, perhaps more will be revealed in the book length version of the story. Considering the strong response this feature got, I'm sure it will sell well. I'll probably pick up a copy--though to save money I'll just check it out of the library.

Justifying Fearmongering

This has been some pandemic. First there were the headlines--splashed across the tops of newspapers across the USA. "Pandemic!" they screamed. "Hide your children!" "Paint your walls with Pine-Sol." "Pre-emptively kill yourself so you don't have to live through Armaggedon."

Then, there was a general shuffling of feet and clearing of throats as the reality sank in that this was not exactly a threat to life as we know it. Turns out that most of the "confirmed" cases of pig flu were now reconfirmed as being unconfirmed. Or, put another way, Mexico had it all wrong. There was a paltry 45 deaths from the so-called swine flu, not the 150 that was originally reported. Other than that, most cases have been mild, and the spread of the virus has significantly slowed just a few weeks into the "epidemic." Only one non-Mexican has died of the flu, and this was someone who for some reason we didn't get a whole lot of info. about, except that the CDC seemed to be saying that her case wasn't cause for alarm.

The next phase was the finger pointing. With the press already being hammered for its failure to report on the economy in any meaningful way, now it was going to have to explain itself for once again buying into--and heavily inflating--the hype. Let's face it, fear sells papers like nothing else. I was in the news business. I know how this works. You're going to keep reading, watching, etc-ing if a story might turn you personally into a statistic. Now the press was caught red-handed doing just this.

Here's where it got really weird. There is now a spate of articles (here's one example from Reuters) coming out which are taking the following position: "Yes, we did overplay the threat. But the effects of all this fear-mongering were positive. People now know to be afraid of viruses, and are taking far more precautions. So, it actually was a good thing we totally screwed this one up."

This is the point at which science, economics, and, really, any study of human behavior goes completely out the window. First of all, as I pointed out in an earlier post, stress takes a toll on human health. Fear is perhaps the hardest on our systems of all the stressors. This is good for our health? I don't think so.

Second, what exactly were the precautions that people took? More frequent handwashing (no doubt with anti-bacterial soap), greater usage of anti-bacterial sprays and hand sanitizers, and staying home from work/school. Well, call me crazy, but the last I checked, there was a rising fear that all of these anti-bacterials could lead to the creation of "superbugs"--in other words, viruses that no one had the natural defenses to fight anymore. Is this sensible caution, or germ-phobic overreaction that could actually cause a real pandemic in the future? You decide.

Finally, I would ask this: does crying wolf every time someone gets the flu keep the public well-informed? Or, is the more likely effect that we'll start discounting these potential health emergencies in the future--even when an actual threat appears?

I have been disappointed and frustrated with the state of health and science journalism for years, but to me this is a new low. Would be nice if someone would show just a tiny bit of remorse and promise to do better next time. Guess I'll keep dreaming.