A Message to Garcia

McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; 
Rowan took the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?"

— Elbert Hubbard

In our teamwork-obsessed era, when it takes a village just to turn the lights on, we'd do well to bring back into everyday use the phrase "a message to Garcia."

As the Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors explains, to "take a message to Garcia" is to "accept responsibility and have enough courage and resourcefulness to complete a task."

Responsibility, courage and resourcefulness are clearly absent from the workplace today. 

The phrase a "message from Garcia" originates from a once-popular 1899 essay about a certain army officer, First Lieutenant Andrew Rowan.

Relying solely on his wits, according to "A Message to Garcia," Lieutenant Rowan ran the Spanish blockade to deliver a crucial letter from then-President William McKinley to the Cuban rebel leader General Calixto Garcia, who was secreted in his mountain hideout.

The Spanish-American War was about to heat up and McKinley wanted Garcia to tell him how many Spanish troops occupied Cuba. 

"There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze," "A Message to Garcia" says of Rowan, "and the statue placed in every college in the land."

The point of the essay is simple: Rowan's exploits should prove to boys that, in a world where lethargy and irresponsibility are the norm, initiative trumps know-how every time.

"No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed hasn't been appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it," "A Message to Garcia" says.

"Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him."

Rowan's guts and ingenuity are qualities every boy should strive to acquire, "A Message to Garcia"  says.

"It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing—carry a message to Garcia!"

In short, the workplace needs studs, omni-competent self-starters who are willing to carry the ball without a full playbook, constant handholding, or the promise of a merit badge at the end.

Alas, the self-esteem movement—and its sappy replacement, social-emotional learning—have robbed our workplaces of studs.

Today, employees are entitled. To offer even a lick of initiative, they demand moment-by-moment mollycoddling by their employers in the form of continuous stimulation, entertainment, rewards and appreciation. 

And so they are awarded gamified jobs, chill-out spaces, flexible hours, onsite masseurs, free catered lunches, nap pods, life coaching, artisanal coffee bars, and free gym memberships.

Absent those perks, they become "disengaged."

Even a text message to Garcia may never arrive.

Above all, "A Message to Garcia" wants readers to know that their value to employers comes not from book-smarts or eagerness, but from a kind of deferential dutifulness, a quiet reliability that puts the "help" in "hired help."

"The man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never has to go on strike for higher wages. 

"Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village—in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can carry a message to Garcia."

Pride of Workmanship

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.

— Doug Conant

Lunch this week at the Wildflower in Tucson reminded me that employees thrive on hard work, when it's demanded of them.

Expecting her to answer "higher wages," I asked our waitress at the end of the meal why the restaurant was able to attract good help.

She responded by saying the owner held every employee to impeccably high work standards—a brisk form of accountability that she found refreshing in the food service business.

"The owner has an 'employee first' approach, if you know what I mean," she said.

I did.

"Employee first" is a business ethos. 

New York restaurateur Danny Meyer pioneered it.

After years of watching restaurants he worked in fail, Meyer arrived at an important realization: the true customer of a restaurant is not the diner, but the restaurant worker. 

So Meyer designs restaurants that cultivate proud—and loyal—workers.

The keys to those environments are discipline and dedication. 

Slackers need not apply.

"Your brand is never better than your employees," Meyer once told executive coach Erica Keswin. "And your employees are never better than the degree to which they are engaged in the reason your company exists."

A new study by Gallup finds that most workplaces are "broken."

Six of 10 employees are "emotionally detached" from their jobs; and 2 in 10 are "miserable."

A mere 20% of the workforce is engaged. 

No surprise, organizations with engaged workers enjoy 23% higher profits than those with disengaged ones. 

They also enjoy lower absenteeism, turnover, and accidents.

In pursuit of those things, some misguided companies think they can instill "employee pride" through propaganda.

They remind me of the restaurant in "Office Space" that demanded its servers wore "flair" to demonstrate a "fun attitude."

Propaganda gets you nowhere.

High standards, on the other hand, appeal to employees' self-worth.

High standards separate the wheat from the chaff because they make the work worth doing.

They also discourage half-assing your way through the workday.

"There are people who try to look as if they are doing a good and thorough job, and then there are the people who actually damn well do it, for its own sake." novelist John D. MacDonald wrote.

The latter are the people you want in your organization.

But sadly, perhaps because they're run by insufferable assholes, most American companies have forgotten about pride of workmanship.

Which is why 80% of workers are either disengaged or miserable.

Federal Court Okays Web Scraping

I've scraped many a website in my time.

"Web scraping," in case you're wondering, refers to the compilation of information that's published on websites.

A few recent examples:

• This week, I wrote a blog post on the birth of art history by web scraping. 
  
  
• Earlier this month, I taught a brainy high schooler how to "speed write" a term paper by web scraping. In the process, I learned more about Shirley Jackson than you'd ever want to know.
  
  
• Last November, I built an e-mail list of insurance executives for a client who had no marketing list.

Web scraping isn't theft.

Theft is what Instagram coach Kar Brulhart faced this week, when a rival ripped off her ideas verbatim and presented them as his own.

Web scraping is research, as a federal court ruled last week.

In the decision, the US Ninth Circuit ruled against LinkedIn, which sued hiQ Labs, a research firm that studies employee attrition.

LinkedIn wanted HiQ to stop scraping its users' profiles.

The court ruled that web scraping doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which defines computer hacking under US law.

Hacking is defined as "unauthorized access to a computer system;" but scraping snatches public data.

The case had reached the Supreme Court last year but was sent back to the US Ninth Circuit for review.

The court's decision is a "major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the Internet," says Tech Crunch.