McGuffins

The main thing I've learned over the years is that the McGuffin is nothing.

― Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock named the mysterious―and incidental―thing that triggers frenzy in a film the McGuffin.

Famous Hollywood McGuffins include the toy sled in Citizen Kane, the transfer papers in Casablanca, the black statue in The Maltese Falcon, the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, and the government secrets in North by Northwest.

Directors love McGuffins.

Managers do, too. Consultants call workplace McGuffins administrivia, which The Urban Dictionary defines as, "mindless bureaucratic tasks imposed on workers by management in order to crush the soul and prevent one from achieving anything useful or fulfilling."

McGuffinish time-wasters are inescapable. The seven worst are:

• Deciphering thoughtless emails 
• Learning seldom-used software platforms 
• Attending purposeless meetings 
• Assembling management reports 
• Explaining the obvious to untrained people 
• Explaining what everybody heard, but no one else wrote down 
• Redoing good work 

If McGuffins like these are triggering frenzy during your day, my advice is:

• Tackle urgent and strategic chores first
• Handle things once
• Identify the one or two biggest time-wasters and eliminate them

Until you learn to deal with workplace McGuffins, you'll never get off the crazy-making, value-destroying treadmill.

The Shepherd's Lives

The geographic constraints of the farm are permanent, but within them
we are always looking for an angle.

― James Rebanks 

I had the honor yesterday to visit the farm of James Rebanks, to interview him for a couple trade magazine articles.

Rebanks is a British sheep farmer, an Internet rock star, and author of The Shepherd's Life, an international phenomenon whose sales have already reached over 320,000 copies.

He sat down for the interview over lunch, his clothes still muddy from the fields, where he'd been working since before dawn to care for his animals (lambing season hasn't quite yet ended, so the farm is busy).

Rebanks mentioned that, after lunch and our interview, he'd be meeting with students in the classroom he and his wife have built onto the rear of their home. Student groups visit the farm regularly to learn about raising sheep. Sheep farming at a small scale isn't very profitable, so teaching is a second income stream for the couple.

Although farming is his occupation, Rebanks, in addition to teaching, supplements his family's income with writing, professional speaking, consulting, and even the occasional construction job.

With the soft demand for wool and meat, crushing competition from industrial farms, and small-famers' meager subsidies from the government, every small sheep farmer is the UK today has to diversify, to get by. The income from a small farm is just too little to sustain anyone.

The next time I complain about having too many clients, too many projects, and too many emails to read, poke me.

Idiocy is Baked In

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses
for execution by idiots.

― Herman Wouk

In a thematic scene in The Caine Mutiny, the worldly Lieutenant Keefer explains how the Navy works to a fresh-faced ensign:

“The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them."

Most 21st century businesses are, of course, designed in the same fashion.

"After nearly a century of effort, the industrial system has created the worker-proof factory," Seth Godin says in The Icarus Deception.

"It’s okay if the person assembling your Domino’s pizza or Apple iPhone doesn’t care. The system cares. The system measures every movement, every bit of output, so all the tolerances are in order.

"It’s okay if the person at the bank doesn’t care—the real work is done by an ATM or a spreadsheet.

"We’ve systematized and mechanized every step of every process.

"By eliminating 'personal' from frontline labor, the industrial system ensures that it can both maintain quality and use ever-cheaper (and ever-fewer) workers."

At this moment, while "surprise and delight" are on every executive's tongue at large businesses, truth be told, the system can't tolerate them.

They cut down too much on productivity.

That threatens shareholder value.

Those master plans "designed by geniuses for execution by idiots" that we call corporations spell opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Because if today's customers really crave "surprise and delight," they'll never find them when they do business with large businesses.

Idiocy is baked in.

Up, Up and Away

The most basic form of human stupidity is
forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

My New Year's resolution is to avoid continual balloon rides.

I refer to conversations that dwell on prospective (not actual) followers, easy money, vaporware, and the idiocy of competitors.

The same holds for conversations that dwell on illness, banking, airlines, politics, and other broken systems.

Though fun while they last, balloon rides suck up time and take you nowhere near your destination.

HAT TIP to Richard Hendrickson for the breezy metaphor.

But You Must Act

Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.

Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.

According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.

Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).

But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).

The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.

If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?

That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.

As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).

The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."

But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.

Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.

He procrastinated.

An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:

Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. 

Are you too self-assured?

Cleaning the Refrigerator

"Busy does not equal important," Seth Godin says, "Measured doesn't mean mattered."

How much time did you spend today on anything of importance?

The challenge lies in the fact that busyness camouflages procrastination.

Fight back! Here are my 10 tips:

1. Pick at least one important item for completion every day
2. Favor the 20% of items that produce 80% of the results
3. Suppress the "urgent"
4. Start before you feel ready
5. Treat your employer's or client's business as your own
6. Take good notes on paper during meetings
7. Don't answer poorly written emails
8. Wear the same outfit every day
9. Tune out the news
10. Complete a simple task first—and take comfort in the fact that even pros procrastinate

A reporter once asked Ernest Hemingway how he faced the blank sheet every day.

Hemingway said, “First, I clean the refrigerator.”

Happy Accidents

Christopher Columbus discovered America while seeking a sea route to Asia.

Alexander Graham Bell was hoping to help teachers of the hearing impaired when he stumbled on the telephone.

Three PayPal employees built YouTube to compete with the dating site Hot or Not.

Objectives feel good, but accidents often outshine them, as researcher Andrew Smart says in Harvard Business Review.

"Our objective obsession might be doing more harm than good, causing people, teams, and firms to stagnate," Smart says.

Statistics and stories about inventions prove that.

"Reports indicate that half are the result of not direct research but serendipity—that is, people being open to interesting and unexpected results."

Smart says we should ditch all the goals for "detours" that might lead to "something new and interesting."

"The more time we spend defining and pursing specific objectives, the less likely we are to achieve something great."

5 Ways to Combat Design Fixation

Marketers who default to an old fix for a new problem are guilty of "design fixation."

It's one reason so much marketing looks copy-cat.

Design fixation—also known as the Einstellung Effect—refers to our tendency to rely blindly on old solutions, and insist our first idea is always the best.

Fortunately, novices are more susceptible to design fixation than old hands, studies show.

How can you free yourself?

Jami Oetting, writing for Hubspot, suggests five antidotes:

• Immerse yourself in new subjects. Escape your marketing bubble and reach for far-afield ideas. Learn a little about voles, snow-sports, fire protection, Washington Irving, and Czarist Russia.

• Work with others. Diversity in experiences, expertise and cultural background and can stimulate fresh thinking.

• Review previous solutions. Peer reviews will expose biases and flaws faster than anything. They force you to look at your ideas with iron-cold eyes.

• Analyze and brainstorm. Generating more ideas helps assure an innovative one will emerge.

• Test. Gather feedback from focus groups and A/B experiments.

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Admirable work only results when creatives draw the line, Seth Godin says in his recent post, "Milton Glaser's Rule:"

"There are few illustrators who have a more recognizable look (and a longer productive career) than Milton Glaser," Godin says. 

"Here's the thing: When he started out, he wasn't THE Milton Glaser. He was some guy hoping for work.

"The rule, then, is that you can't give the client what he wants. You have to give the client work that you want your name on. Work that's part of the arc. Work that reflects your vision, your contribution and your hand.

"That makes it really difficult at first. Almost impossible. But if you ignore this rule because the pressure is on, it will never get easier."

Agency exec Bill Kircher (my former boss) used to spout similar adages when the pressure was on. I'll sum them up in a rule I'll call "Kircher's Law:"

Whenever an agency bows to a client's creative direction, the probability of later incrimination approaches 100%.

Although creatives are quick to cite their duty to themselves, the truth is, every professional shares the right to draw the line.

Remember the film The King's Speech? 

Early in the story, the therapist draws the line with a haughty Queen Elizabeth: "Sorry, this is my game, played on my turf, by my rules."

But with prerogative comes accountability. You can't have your kingly cake and eat it, too. 

Do you:

• Respect everyone, coworkers and clients alike?
• Arrive on site ready to work?
• Tackle chores that need to be done to stay in business?
• Avoid short cuts and excuses?
• Learn from mistakes?
• Consider how your decisions affect the company, not just your department or career?
• Speak truthfully and with the passion of an owner?

Do you—where do you—draw the line?

On-Demand Undermines Even Investors

In the 19th century, an enterprising forebear of mine owned a block of houses in the mining town of Franklin, New Jersey, that he leased to workers.

Unbeknownst to the workers, he also leased his mineral rights to the local mining company, which promptly dug a shaft beneath the houses.

According to family lore, my forbear had to skedaddle one dark night, when all the houses and their occupants vanished in a mine-shaft collapse.

Lesson learned.

When investors undermine workers, everyone gets the shaft.

The halo's fast falling from the Uberization of work, Caroline Fairchild writes on LinkedIn.

Millennial entrepreneurs are shifting workers from 1099 to W-2 status, because they're learning that, to succeed, they have to do things like train people and ask them to show up at 9.

You know, 19th century stuff.

As Fairchild shows, on-demand startups that want to appify black markets in everything from home delivery to hospitality face harsh critics.

"As these venture capital darlings walk the fine line between saving on labor costs and breaking the law, regulators and politicians are watching, and critiquing, their every move," she writes.

"The lines being drawn here raise critical questions: Should workers embrace the freedom the digital world offers? Or should they try to hold onto the rights that their predecessors fought over 100 years to win? Is this new economy moving us forward or backward?"

Forward or backward? What do you think?

The Dirty Little Secrets of a Technical Writer

Technology journalist Michelle Bruno contributed today's post. She covers technology and face-to-face meetings in her weekly newsletter, Event Tech Brief.

One might marvel at how I, someone who literally cannot navigate the remote controls of the television set, can write about computer networks and software. It’s really very simple.

The first thing I do when confronted with a particularly complex project is avoid panic. I know now there will be a point at which everything makes sense. It’s just a matter of time.

If the client has not given me source materials, which is rare, I create my own library of research—pulling from Google Scholar or scientific journals and magazines accessed from the library of a local college (a benefit of being an adjunct faculty member).

Almost always, I print the resource materials out on paper and highlight them with a colored marker. As I scan, I begin to formulate an outline in my head.

If I become blocked or overwhelmed, I take a nap.

No writer, even the most experienced, can know everything about everything. That’s why subject matter experts are my best friends. Most software engineers or network administrators are interested that I’m interested and indulge my curiosity.

No matter what I write, every word on the page is still a part of speech: noun, adjective, verb, adverb and so on. 

For example, network, cloud, and machine are nouns. Virtualize, orchestrate, and provision are verbs. It’s critical to get everything in the correct slot.

Structure is very important to me. Even in technical writing, I try to make sure every opening paragraph gives the reader a clue about what they will learn as they read on. 

Every paragraph I write has a topic sentence. If I start out with a list in the first paragraph, I make sure the explanatory paragraphs in the body are in the same order as the items in the list. 

While attempts to be humorous or ironic are normally ill advised in technical writing, I still try to be elegant and clever. Words are still my children and I try to present them in the best light possible.

When I’m not writing, I read. I look for structure and elegance even in the most technical of articles. It’s a blessing and a curse.

I edit as I write. Most of the time I spend more time on the opening paragraph than I do on the entire article. I can’t get comfortable until my direction for the piece is set.

When I finish a project, I deliver it to the client and never read it again for fear I might find a comma out of place or begin agonizing over a word choice.

Technical writers receive exactly zero feedback. Most of the time, my efforts aren’t even acknowledged (one reason I blog). So, to get some warm fuzzy, I share the paper with my husband, who always says, “How the hell do you write stuff like this? You can’t even turn on the TV set.” I just smile.

Postscript by Bob James: Want a weekly dose of wicked good insight?

Subscribe to Event Tech Brief. It's free, and nobody covers the beat better. 

Nobody.

Wintry Discontent

I get terrorists.  

But why does someone who's not politically minded relentlessly bully schoolmates, shoot up a theater, drive a speeding car into a crowd, or hike the price of a life-saving drug 5,500 percent?

Pessimism. A First World problem, if ever there was one.

In The Conquest of Happiness, philosopher Bertrand Russell devotes a chapter to pessimism, a feeling he has little patience for.

Pessimism, he says, "is born of a too easy satisfaction of natural needs."

When too much falls into your lap, struggle, "an essential ingredient of happiness," ends; and, with it, desire.

"The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. 

"If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. 

"He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

Lost in a Daydream

One hundred years ago this month, Einstein stood before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and read his paper describing the General Theory of Relativity, "the most beautiful theory in the history of science," according to biographer Walter Isaacson.

Isaacson wants to use the centennial to celebrate daydreaming, as he says in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

Einstein concocted the theory not by recasting formulas, but by daydreaming about light beams and billiard balls.

Isaacson argues we should goad kids to accomplish more than memory-work. "We should stimulate their minds’ eyes as well."

"Everything of value in our world started at some point with an idle daydream," writes marketer Mark Schaefer in Born to Blog. "Dreaming helps us connect the dots. Dreaming is mandatory for seeing the world as it should be, rather than how it is."

Take a few minutes today, grab a coffee or chocolate bar, and celebrate Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

But, please, don't interrupt your daydream.

Parents, Quit Mollycoddling

"Helicopter parents" have spawned a generation of incompetents, says Stanford’s former dean of freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims and author of How to Raise an Adult.

She recently told the Los Angeles Times that a helicopter parent is incapable of raising a future worker, "Somebody who pitches in, who rolls up their sleeves and says, 'How can I be useful here,' instead of, 'Why isn't everyone applauding my every move?'"

Before powered flight, texting and nanny cams, our forebears had a term for helicopter parenting: mollycoddling.

Coddling in the 18th century meant to treat someone as if he or she were an invalid. The word derived from caudle, a drink served to the sick. Molly derived from an 18th century pejorative for a gay man.

A man who was considered timid and ineffectual was thought to have been raised by overprotective parents, or mollycoddled.

Thank goodness, invalids no longer have to drink gruel; or gay men, prove they're courageous.

But I like old words.

So I urge overprotective parents: you're jeopardizing America's competitiveness and your child's future income! Quit mollycoddling.

Edward Bellamy's Incredible Crystal Ball

“Marty McFly Day” is as good a day as any to look back at another time-travel entertainment—one that electrified our grandparents' grandparents.

Published at the height of the Gilded Age, Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward became the Number 1 best-seller of its time.

It tells the story of a Boston Brahmin who time-travels to the year 2000 and discovers that life in the future is pretty comfortable:

• War, waste, global warming, crime, unemployment, income inequality, gender differences, advertising and political parties have disappeared.

• Everyone is at least bi-lingual. People speak a native language and the universal language.

• The only form of money is the debit card. People use it to shop at vast warehouse clubs like Costco, but act with civility towards one another, because everyone's well educated. All purchases are delivered to shoppers' homes, via pneumatic tubes.

• Employee engagement approaches 100% and job promotions are based solely on merit. People who refuse to work are imprisoned, and receive only bread and water.

• People retire in comfort at age 45.

• Housework is fully automated.

• Congress meets only once every five years.

Bellamy sold more than a half million copies of Looking Backward. His blueprint for the year 2000 was so talked-about, over 160 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up across the US.

Forty-seven years after the novel's appearance, Columbia University named it the most important book by a 19th century American.

A Farewell to Apps

It was a pleasant cat café, bright and clean and friendly, and I took my tablet out of my brown and saffron backpack and started to write. I was writing about the next all-hands meeting and the email was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor drink my mochaccino. Then the email was finished and I read it and saw that it was a good email but very long.

A girl came in the cat café and sat at the table next to mine. She was very pretty with a face as clear and clean as an iPhone box if they packaged iPhones in skin and painted the logo on with crimson lipstick freshened by a cool autumn rain. She smiled at me with her gently modeled face and her eyes looked inquisitive. "Using the app?" she said.

"To pay for my coffee?"

"No, The Hemingway app. It edits your writing."

"It's news to me."

"It cuts dead words from your writing and highlights passive constructions, so you write with the power and clarity of Papa, only faster and easier and without the beard. It costs only $9.99."

"I'll be sure to read the reviews."

She nodded and then I went back to my email and read it a second time and felt sad because it was very long. I clicked on Safari to download the app and launched the beach ball of death showing the wi-fi was broken and all the sadness of the big city filled me suddenly, with the streets turned to wet blackness by a cold winter rain and the storefronts all dark as if they were once Radio Shacks and Borders and Blockbusters and A&Ps and I thought my writing was slow and bloated and perhaps out of date like those stores.

I finished reading the last paragraph and looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she's not saddled with student debt like one of the mules we took up the mountainside at Caporetto, I thought. But I felt sad. I shut down my tablet and put it in my backpack and said psh psh psh to a black and white tuxedo kitty that came and restored my dignity.

The King of Clockwork

I envy the grimacing joggers I pass on my way to work every weekday morning for their samurai discipline and inveterate svelteness (a quality I lack).

Leadership and personal productivity experts goad us to rise above mediocrity by forming useful habits.

Surpassing champs like Kant, Edison and Einstein, the king of the clockwork habit could well be Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.

He wrote with such regularity, that he produced 47 novels—plus 32 plays, short stories and nonfiction books—in his spare time.

Stephen King (with 60 novels and 200 short stories, no slouch either) describes Trollope's habit in his memoir, On Writing: 

"His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two an a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-pound heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book."