professormyers.com

Experience and Qualifications

Lawrence Lessig has thoroughly researched the background and experience of each U.S. vice-president and concludes that Sarah Palin, should she be elected, would be the least experienced since Chester Arthur. Can we afford this?, he asks. The answer: "we've had enough recklessness this century."

Footnote on the style of this narrated presentation: Lessig has an innovative approach to using PowerPoint that uses a simple, stark background; a small number of key words or phrases per slide; and pictures that actually illustrate what's being said. For a similar style, see Garr Reynold's work.

Peggle, The Sequel

You know casual PC gaming has gone mainstream when the NY Times reviews the newly released sequel to the most addictive game of 2007. Yes, Peggle Nights is now available. There goes my remaining free time....

Neologism of the Day: Qualifiction

A teaser on the front page of this week's Simmons Voice, the college newspaper, declares "Student questions Palin's qualifictions [sic]." That last word was a typo - obviously the intended word was "qualification" - but when you think about it, "qualifiction" is a dandy word for false or misleading credentials. On resumes, people commonly stretch the truth of their experience by taking more credit for some accomplishment than they probably deserve. But lies presented as truths are, in a sense, fictions. Thus a new word for the week - "qualifiction: the outright misrepresentations of job titles, degrees, or achievements that are presented to bolster one's suitability for a job." Pass it on!

Green Jobs

Yahoo Green, that company's portal for all things environmental, has a list of resources for finding jobs and companies related to sustainability, renewable energy, and other earth-minded issues. Gotta love the final paragraph:

Another green tip: Many companies encourage applying online these days, so you can email your resume. But if you have to print it, look for high-quality paper made with recycled fibers. No point killing trees when you're applying for an earth-friendly job!

To which I say: if you needed to be told to apply on-line for a job related to sustainability, you're probably not qualified for it.

Pandora's Box Opens

It didn't take long, but experimentation with WI-FI access on airplanes has already become problematic. American Airlines' flight attendants want filters installed to prevent in-flight porn viewing. It takes a certain bodaciousness to visit XXX sites in public; but then again, there are those who aim to join the "Mile High Club," so who can really be surprised at this development? Yet, as the article in CNet explains

Given that people are packed onto planes literally elbow to elbow, it's often hard not to at least glance at the laptop screen of the person sitting next to you. But airlines have not banned people from reading pornographic magazines or watching their own DVDs on flights. And it's just as easy for someone to view a DVD of an adult video on a laptop or flip through Hustler as it is to surf porn Web sites.

The truth is that it hasn't been a major problem on flights thus far. In fact, American Airline's spokesman Tim Smith told Bloomberg that the "vast majority" of customers already use good judgment in what's appropriate to look at while flying versus what's not.

To be sure, the airlines should be concerned about creating an environment for its employees - and customers - that could be deemed sexual harassment. I'm willing to trust my fellow passengers to have the good sense to leave the porn surfing for home. But if any of them tries to use VOIP -  I say ban them from flying for life!

News Media Lose It Over Lipstick

This whole Obama/Palin/lipstick smear is infuriating. John McCain in running on the strength of his character, but what kind of character is it to approve campaign messages that lie and distort the facts about your opponent? Worse still, though, is the media's playing along. It's one thing to report events as they occur; that's called news. But the endless bloviating is shameful, and yet another sign of the drop in quality of the work done by the mainstream media. Thankfully, Time's Mark Halperin has broken ranks with some clear-thinking. Here's how he chastised his peers on CNN last night:

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, listen, you can say all you want, John McCain said this about Hillary's health care proposal. But it was still foolish for Barack Obama to say because every night is precious for him, Anderson, in terms of getting his message out.

This is one night lost on your program where his message got muffled by this silliness over lipstick on a pig.

COOPER:Mark, you're shaking your head.

MARK HALPERIN, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Stop the madness. I think, with all due respect to the program's focus on, listen to David just said. I think this is the press just absolutely playing into the McCain campaign's crocodile tears.

COOPER: Crocodile tears.

HALPERIN: Yes.

COOPER: They knew exactly what it is.

HALPERIN: They knew exactly what he was saying. It's an expression. And this is a victory for the McCain campaign in the sense that every day they can make this a pig fight in the mud. It's good for them because it's reducing Barack Obama's message even more.

But I think this is a low point in the day and one of the low days of our collective coverage of this campaign. To spend even a minute on this expression, I think, is amazing and outrageous.

COOPER: Let's move on.

Yes, please, let's!

Person Mark halperin

Right click for SmartMenu shortcuts

How One Small Error Leads to a Big Problem

A NYC man is suing American Airlines for mislocating his dead wife's body. Apparently the cause of the problem was a simple typo:

Funeral director Kathleen DeRiso said the shipping error was caused by someone at American who punched in the wrong airport code. She said they wrote GUA for Guatemala instead of GYE for Guayaquil.

"It was not our error," DeRiso said, adding that the body was properly embalmed and "there was no decomposition." She said it was the first time in her 18 years of dealing with American that such a mistake had happened.

We know humans are not infallible, and that's why systems need to have redundancies built in. There should have been some technology, practice, or other means of double-checking the destination of such important cargo as a casket with a body in it. This blunder is just another reason people should not ship their live pets via passenger aircraft.

More on Ambient Awareness: An Ethical Issue

Here's a brief, but thoughtful, essay on the ethical issues PR people (and others) may face when using Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook. Specifically, it considers the potential conflicts of interest that can happen when one doesn't fully disclose professional affiliations (i.e., ties to clients) in posts that members of one's online network will see. The author, Steve Rubel, shares his practices for avoiding such conflicts. 

Governance in the News

It's not at all unusual to find an article or two related to corporate governance in any given issue of the Wall Street Journal. Today, the subject dominated the front page, what with the Feds' takeover of Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) and the ouster of WAMU's (WM) CEO. An opinion piece on the impending (well, by 2016) replacement of GAAP rules with something called the International Financial Reporting Standards may likely have the longest lasting economic impact of any item into today's paper. Intended to make apples-to-apples transnational comparisons between firms and thus provide greater consistency and transparency in financial reporting, the new system will bring at least two significant changes:

There are specific differences between the two systems; for example, the international system only allows the first-in, first-out inventory accounting system. The most important difference is that the international standard is based on principles, whereas GAAP is based on rules. GAAP suffers from the complexity of trying to set rules for all situations, a complexity that often masks economic reality...GAAP rules fill a nine-inch, three-volume set of pronouncements plus interpretive information. In contrast, IFRS is a slim two-inch book. GAAP was crafted in part by the pressures of the U.S. legal system. Companies have been glad for GAAP rules as defenses for claims of accounting irregularities. But these rules often only pretend to provide clarity.

Accounting firms such as Deloitte will have their hands -- and coffers - full in the years ahead as they educate their clients and employees. Business schools, which will have to change their curricula, might be well positioned to develop exec ed courses or seminars to get a piece of this pie as well.

Awareness, Ambient & Otherwise

An interesting sociological perspective on Twitter and Facebook appears in today's NYTimes magazine and explains, in part, their growing popularity. Some key paragraphs:

...awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some...

Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter — she has more than 5,300 followers — recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants.

Technology tends to create its own demand. As with most tools, Web 2.0 technologies are becoming popular among individuals as well as organizations because they provide value. Some uses of Twitter and Facebook updates -- documenting one's location, activity, or mood, for instance -- are readily apparent. Others are being discovered and invented by users; I'm following the lead of some academics who use Twitter to relay messages to students and to enable the class members to send "tweets" to me and each other when they have questions about the material. Stay tuned to see what results from this experiment.....

How Not To Better Serve Customers

If the operations managers at my local CVS have ever taken an operations management class, they must have skipped the sessions on waiting lines and customer service. Here's a picture of the store's main checkout area, which has 6 cash registers but seldom more than three checkout clerks.

 

Signs above direct customers to form lines in front of each register "so we can better serve you."  As you can see, the store was not especially busy when I took this picture just moments after my most recent visit.

Doing as instructed, I stood next in line behind a customer who had begun her transaction at the register. I waited as what appeared to be an inexperienced clerk received assistance from another employee with handling a rain check. Meanwhile, the lines at the registers to my right and left were shrinking, and new people joining them were served quickly. Should I have changed lines and taken the chance that I too would be served quickly, even though it seemed that in just a few seconds it would, at last, be my turn?  The best tactic would perhaps have been to straddle two lines so I could shift to the one that would get me through the quickest. But that is exactly the behavior CVS seeks to discourage with its signs, likely fearing that the resulting chaos - especially at peak hours - would agitate customers and create resentment as they competed for places in line.

I didn't feel especially well-served by this queuing system. Instead of following a system-wide first-come/first-served discipline that is generally regarded as fair and efficient, CVS has opted for a system that punishes customers for following directions (and for being unlucky) and rewards those who disregard their customers and fellow shoppers. Banks, movie theaters, and most airlines adapted single lines long ago that ensure customers are served in chronological order of their arrival. This CVS store has a large enough area in front of the registers to easily accommodate such a line - but that may require it to forfeit space currently occupied by a merchandising display or two.

The structure of line is just one aspect of queuing. The other is how the line is managed. One of the other clerks might have waved me over ahead of a customer who had just appeared on line, or a manager might have intervened to do the same. Instead, I was ignored and left to silently curse myself for choosing the wrong line. This system may allow CVS to better serve its customers, but in this instance it also allowed its employees to miss the opportunity to do so.

In Defense of Grammar

I recently discovered an interesting and fun blog written by a former student mine. Imagine my surprise to see that a few months ago she featured a comment I made in class:

Last night, in my Leadership, Governance, and Accountability class, the prof said (in reference to papers he had just graded), "...and finally, this is just a pet peeve of mine, but impact is a noun. If something has an impact, then you say that it affects something. However, I've already lost the business battle on incentivize, although we already have a verb for that as well, which is motivate, so I'm probably going to lose this one as well."
I was amused, as I had used the word impact as a verb in my paper--I guess I've learned a lot of business-speak in business school. (Go figure!) As I was telling my husband the story, he started telling me about how, as a geek, he completely tunes out anything that might come after one of those "business speak" words.

Shortly after her post, a reader commented that her professor - moi! - was "a little off" and quoted from what he proported to be supporting evidence from a dictionary. Wow! - to my knowledge that was the first time I've been dinged in blogger-land. In my own defense, I cite The American Heritage Book of English Usage:

The use of impact as a verb meaning “to have an effect” often has a big impact on readers. Eighty-four percent of the Usage Panel disapproves of the construction to impact on, as in the phrase social pathologies, common to the inner city, that impact heavily on such a community. Ninety-five percent disapprove of the use of impact as a transitive verb in the sentence Companies have used disposable techniques that have a potential for impacting our health. It’s unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it can’t be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, and its figurative use dates from 1935, allowing people plenty of time to get accustomed to it. It may be that its frequent appearance in jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, military officials, and financial analysts has made people suspicious. Nevertheless, the use of impact as a verb has become so common in corporations and institutions that younger speakers have begun to regard it as standard. It seems likely, therefore, that the verb impact will eventually become as usual as the verb contact has become over the last 30 years.

I maintain my original position, and I'm heartened to know that nearly all of the usage experts at American Heritage agree. And as for "incentivize": don't get me started....

Career Advice from the '60s

One of my favorite TV shows is  AMC's Mad Men, both for the drama and the history lesson. It's eye-opening just how much gender relations in the workplace have changed since the early 1960's. In last week's episode, Bobbie Barrett, wife and agent of crude comic Jimmy Barrett's  (a pain-in-the-*ss client of the Sterling Cooper ad agency ) offered this advice to the ambitious, but sometimes mousy, career woman Peggy Olsen:

Find find the job you want and become the person who does it.

Presumably, this means building the skills, developing the temperament, and cultivating the relationships required to succeed in the position. Sounds like good advice, assuming one is content to accept the status quo.

The problem is that Bobbie's advice takes as a starting point existing organizational structures (i.e., roles, relationships, responsibilities) and the opportunities within them.These limitations are exacerbated by having to deal with the stereotypes, social preferences, and traditions that come into play during hiring decisions. Bobbie seems to be telling Peggy to act as a man acts - speak her mind, ask for what she wants, expect to be treated as an equal - but too often women who do so get penalized for not fulfilling expectations of how women should act.

Today, one more commonly is advised to "follow your passion" when choosing a career. This approach starts from the perspective of the individual and implies that one should find the firm and the position that can tap into, accommodate, and nurture one's ardor and enthusiasm. It is at heart an entrepreneurial approach to creating a satisfying professional life, and it echoes how my colleague Teresa Nelson thinks about entrepreneurship - as a state of mind rather than a set of activities. Perhaps women benefit more than do men by building their careers this way, since it is less constrained by the vestiages of out-moded beliefs and outright sexism that still exist in too many organizations. Still, the Peggys of today have more choices and opportunities than Bobbie and her generation could have ever dreamed 45 or so years ago.   

Neologism of the Day: "Whuffie"

Today I learned (hat tip: Cecily) a new word: "whuffie." 

Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow, who is writing a book about the subject, defines it this way:

The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.

In that same blog post she explains the origins of the word:

The term, itself, was coined by Cory Doctorow in his amazing Sci-Fi book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as the currency of the future. The generalized definition gleaned from this book is:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

So, you can gain Whuffie through being nice, networked or notable. This is not science fiction. It’s becoming more and more relevant today.

Social capital has long been an interest of sociologists and other academics; I remember when some of this work was called "culture capital" in the 1980's. But today, with the Web having made social networking so easy and popular, I think we'll all be talking about whuffie before too long.

A Better Way to Keep Notes

For students (or anyone else) looking for a way to organize and keep better track of their notes, I highly recommend Evernote. Lifehacker gives it a great review today, and others have similarly offered raves. Here's a recent video review from G4.

This cross-platform - desktop (PC/Mac), web, iPhone - application can capture all kinds of information through entering text, capturing screen shots and web clippings, even recording voice. Its powerful search function can read text in photos, which allows it to search handwritten class notes that have either been scanned or photographed (e.g., with a cell phone camera!). It's also useful when doing research: a few quick snap shots of an article or other document eliminates the need for photocopying and thus saves paper.

I've long been using Microsoft's OneNote as my digital notebook, and I like the many ways it integrates with the rest of the Office suite. But the ability to access my notes from anywhere via the web - including with my Treo 755p - is an unbeatable feature (Evernote's features best those of Google notebook). Evernote has even made the transition easy with its OneNote 2007 import wizard! Oh, and did I mention it's FREE?

SMS: The Key to an Obama Victory?

I was one of the hundreds of thousands of Barack Obama supporters who waited anxiously all day Friday for the "we want you to be the first to know" text message announcing his VP selection. Mine arrived at 1:37 a.m. EST Saturday, late by several hours given that the major media, led by the A.P, broke the news about Joe Biden late Friday evening.  Color me disappointed.

One positive result, though, of Obama's text-messaging strategy is all the attention now being given to its real benefit: voter turnout. Among the many articles is fascinating blog post by author and consultant Tomi T Ahonen (hat tip to Tim Leberecht). In it he discusses the world-wide popularity of text messaging and points to research that shows its use can increase voter participation by more than 4%. His analysis concludes that if this year's presidential election mirrors that of 2004, the use of text messaging would tip Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa -- and the electoral college victory - to Obama. Now that's a technological change you can believe in!

Credit crisis? What credit crisis?

With all the news and economic impact of the sub-prime mortgage loan fiasco and the associated credit card crisis, one would think financial institutions would have tightened up their approval processes for new lines of credit. A recent experience doesn't give me much confidence in that.

I'm planning to upgrade my PC (new processor, motherboard, memory, etc) so I can finally get decent frame rates on Crysis. My preferred online tech retailer  is Newegg, which consistently has great prices as well as an active community of customers who provide feedback about their purchases. Yesterday I opted to apply for a "Preferred Account," which is basically a company-specific credit card that offers various purchase promotions. I filled out the necessary info (after checking to make sure the site was secure!) and was stunned that I received instant (well, in no more than 10 seconds) approval for a credit line of $8000. Since it was Sunday and I doubt the credit department is fully-staffed on that day, the company obviously uses some automated process. Was it just a quick check of my FICO score or some complicated algorithm that led Newegg (or more importantly, its partner CIT Bank) to decide I was trustworthy enough to be extended a line of credit? And what about identity theft?

Fast forward to this morning when I receive a call to verify that I did, in fact, open a new account with Newegg. I had provided my telephone number in the application, and as a fraud prevention measure, the call seems reasonable and appropriate. Except the rep who called asked no further questions, thanked me, and hung up. Couldn't an identify thief just as easily answered the question - and truthfully - as long as the telephone number on the app was his rather than mine? I've grown accustomed to answering all kinds of security questions on-line and off to confirm my identity; good thing I can remember every address I've ever lived at and the name of my elementary school. While it can be a hassle, it's also reassuring to know my financial institutions have implemented steps to decrease the likelihood of fraud.

But what are these firms, many of whom have shown such poor judgment recently in extending credit, doing to verify the veracity of the information provided in credit applications and the creditworthiness of the applicant? Consumers have grown so accustomed to easy credit that many of us would balk if asked to provide actual documentation of our assets or other intrusions on our privacy. Credit scores are a record of past bill-paying behavior and as such are a lagging indicator of one's current financial situation. Moral hazard and adverse selection have always been central considerations in risk management for financial institutions. If credit scores are the defense of choice against these, then it behooves us all to make sure the info they're based on is accurate. Maybe it's time to request a copy of my own from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion