Stories

20 December 2011 //

You’ve all heard, no doubt, about the power of stories — including stories in the corporation. Companies of all sizes are calling in storytellers to help loosen up creative powers, to suggest coherent story lines in apparently unconnected data, and simply to make the business environment more human(e).

Aside from grunting and scratching, the story is the most primitive and archaic communication medium, and this may account for its enduring power.

Who can resist the idea of then, and then, and then? Then what happens? It’s the impulse that drives our daily lives, our not knowing what next and yet stepping bravely, or foolishly, forward.

And the impulse that keeps companies going, despite or because of all the rational and scientific management plans that can be devised.

Of course, a business with no plan, no idea, of the next step may be stepping into a bog of its own devising.

Once upon a time there was a company called XYZ that had a brilliant idea and no idea what to do with it. Until the time it was four or five years old, it enjoyed a series of spectacular successes. It was coddled by the market, wooed by investors, and gave back fabulous ROI. Then along came the big bad wolf of recession, tight credit, customer fickleness, and … and … and …

Tags story

Categories creativity, narrative, story

Reading: who has time anymore?

7 August 2011 //

I’m of an age (say, “old”) to remember how thrilling it was to discover the powers that reading unlocked. As a good, squeaky-clean Catholic schoolboy, I was brought up not just on Dick and Jane, the heroes of our primers, but the missal for the mass (in Latin and English), various songbooks (including Gregorian chant), and of course the bible.

A young friend and I, along about fifth grade, would compete to see who could read the assigned textbooks first.

And we devoured the Hardy Boys thrillers along with the page-turning maritime tales of Howard Pease.

I remember, in fact, malingering a few days so I could stay home, curled up in the sack, and read these things. They were immense private pleasures, the kind commemorated in the lines of Longfellow inscribed above the lintel of a community library where I once lived in St. Paul, Minnesota:

The love of learning,

The sequestered nooks,

The sweet serenity of books.

These days, it seems, fewer of us have the leisure to take a book and retreat into a niche with it. (It’s a nice occupation, we might say.) Unless we’re on vacation, that is, or stealing a few free moments at lunch or on the bus.

Having moved recently from a private house to a rented condo, however, I find myself with more time on my hands and, like my wife, I am consumed by reading. I find myself, in fact, reading greedily, a habit that my younger sister, who also has a teacher’s background, calls “greading” (something she’s done both alone and with her daughter for many years).

I find myself recovering habits of mind, and body too (that fetus-like curling, that sighing, that clock oblivion), that a busy career in teaching and writing seemed to have obliterated.

I’m not claiming that I forgot how to read, as I taught or wrote for a living. Simply that as for the majority of us reading for pleasure seemed to fade away. It was generally reading for work, either teaching or business writing, that preoccupied me.

And that confirmed in me the habits of mind that a writer needs so badly and that distinguish him from most folks:

A love of words for words’ sake (the pleasure of their sound, their tactility)
An equal love of logic and clarity (those critical-learning gifts that a noisy commercial culture would banish)
An ability to organize thoughts that, without being written out, would dissipate or never cohere

What I’m finding, in my latest greading phase, in short, is a recovered ability to enjoy our cultural heritage — the gifts that our elders have handed down for generations and that we continue, in our place, to hand down to youngsters. And to enjoy the sense that logic, clarity, and pleasure in words are things that matter above the trivial distractions that crowd our days.

What have I been reading? All sorts of stuff, really, though strangely not any fiction per se (my mainstay, for pleasure reading, during my working career). How about these titles:

The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality (2010) by Jeff Pearlman. An easy read and no great shakes, really, but fun. Boo hoo, another star, another hero has fallen, Clemens, the thesis goes, cheated, and all red-blooded American baseball fans were cheated too of what we might have expected of a Hall of Fame type.
Mozart: A Life (2006) by Peter Gay. Learned a few things about the genius Wolfgang that I didn’t know, including stuff about his relation with father and emperor. This short bio is one of the Penguin short life series.
Truman by David McCullough (1992). This fat biography of our 33rd president is thick with fact and lived experience. From pioneer days in Independence, Missouri through Truman’s ride to the White House, McCullough presents the life in interesting, measured chapters. We learn a lot about where Truman came from both physically and psychologically. The unsatisfying thing about the book is that McCullough presents the facts but rarely interprets or analyzes them. What are we to think, in the end, for example, of Truman’s dependency on Pendergast, the Kansas City political boss, for every career move Truman made? Or for Truman’s ambivalent relation to FDR, the man who barely talked to him and yet elevated him to the top?
De Kooning: An American Master (2006) by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. This bio is by far the best, an immensely readable saga of the life, art, and dementia of one of our foremost “abstract expressionists,” if you can call De Kooning that. Equal parts life and art, the analysis is exact and it never stoops to amateur psychologizing. It’s the kind of text, with illustrations, that makes you eager to read the next thing these fine writers might be turning their attention to.
Willem De Kooning's Woman I: kinda scary, yes?
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2007) by Joe Bageant. I snatched this bad boy from my wife, who had ordered it from Amazon. And devoured it in pretty short order. Despite the charge of ranting that could easily be laid at Bageant’s doorstep, I found the book tremendously clarifying. It explains, in convincing detail, why America’s working class consistently votes (and thinks) against its own self-interest, identifying as Freud would say with the aggressors (the rich, the capitalists). The plain folk of Winchester, Virginia, Bageant’s townsmen and neighbors, are descendants of the Scots Irish that battled the English crown and each other — and came to America to escape taxes and government repression. As my 3 year old granddaughter is fond of singing, they too “won’t bow down to no man”!
Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle (2011) by Thor Hanson. This work of natural history explains how bird feathers evolved, from dinosaur to bird, and details both form and function. Hanson deals with 19th through 21st century scientific controversies about this evolution and interlards the text with many easy-to-understand examples of his own field work, as when he dissects and examines the frozen carcass of a flicker in his “Raccoon Shack.”
Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004) edited by Rosamund Barlett. These are wonderful, vivid letters by Chekhov, the Russian story teller and playwright who lived from 1860 to 1904. As one of the great modernist writers, Chekhov is both self-made and original. He didn’t accept the cant of the church or state, and had no use for lying by friend or family. Each letter, no matter how obscure the details, blows with the fresh breath of honesty and precocious wisdom.
Building Strong Brands (1996) by David A. Aaker. This sequel to Managing Brand Equity defines, illustrates, and explains the process of, yes, building strong brands. Companies without strong brands, from bakeries to auto producers, risk forfeiting large market shares, indeed losing their entire market.

OK, OK, I have more time now than formerly. I’m not a home owner, I own a life. A life in letters, you might say, and reading.

And for a fee, a small fee all things considered, I can make it available to you. (I won’t write politics or literature for you, but what I write will be filtered through the great and the not so great things I’ve managed to read. And reading, as I intimate, in this time and place may not be so widespread as it once was. We’re too busy texting and surfing the Web. But more on these distractions later.)

Tags critical thinking, habits of mind, leisure, reading

Categories discourse, literacy

You need us more than we need you

7 August 2011 //

Outrageous, yes, but true. “You need us more than we need you” was the text of a hugger-mugger business card that an account exec carried, and showed to a select few, at a marcomm agency where I used to work.

The card was good for laughs. And soothed our bruised egos, no doubt. The ones that might have been battered about by ungrateful boss and clueless client.

But however outrageous, the card expressed more than a seed of truth.

You need me, just as I need you.

Writers, designers, developers, and AE’s at agencies have talents that aren’t readily duplicated in the corporation:

The ability to write clearly, cleanly, succinctly, and on message
The gift of designing a logo, ad, or website that knocks the graphic socks and jocks off the audience
The genius for patiently and accurately bearing messages back and forth between client management and agency creative, in effect, two halves of the one brain

Sure, you can save money by doing it yourself. The same way a homeowner can save money by patching his own roof.

Chances are, however, you won’t do as good a job as the pro.

And could end up with a leaky roof, or bottom line, for a long, long time.

So when it comes to finding the right words, designing an impressive website, sending the correct message across the sulcae from left brain to right brain, you need us.

Just as your customers need you.

Isn’t it great to be indispensable?

Tags design, message, mutual need, slogan, writing

Categories creativity, literacy

Too many gorillas

16 July 2011 //

Moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, from Minneapolis, just a month ago and have devoted part of this time to observing the differences and oddities of my new home.

Besides the accent, I mean (“dubya-dubya-dubya dot fateville dot city dot US dot guv,” for example).

Besides the wonderfully undulating hills all around the city. And the hard clay and rock that undergirds the hills.

Besides the searing and nearly unbearable heat, with a heat index of 100 to 110 per day already in June.

Besides the friendly waves of the natives as they drive by. Or the instant conversations started up by strangers.

Besides the squashed armadillos on the roads — archaic armored creatures that look grotesque, dead or alive, and seem to have sprung up out of an ancient earth.

I mean the odd and different fact, primarily (for this writing anyway) of gorillas.

No, not real gorillas in the wild. (Armadillos are scary enough.)

Fake gorillas used in retail promotions, I mean. People who are paid to stand in this sweltering sun with a silly gorilla mask on their face, or a suit, to sell pizza or hair cuts or oil changes.

Geez!

The indignity of it!

A company called Gorilla Promotions does gorilla promotions, evidently

The manager of a local furniture store tells me these kinds of promos were very common in Florida, where he worked recently, because they were cheaper and more effective than newspaper ads. Instead of spending $4500 for a full page spread in the Tampa paper, for example, hire a troop of gorillas for $1500 — and get far better results.

But I find it hard to believe that these guerrilla/gorilla promotions could bring in that much cash. One local gorilla is pushing pizzas that sell for $5.99. That’s the claim on the window of the store, anyway. How many pizzas do you have to sell to pay this hairy oaf and realize a profit? How much residual good do these stunts create?

When you hear your belly gnawing, do you say to yourself, Oh, yeah, I want one of those cheap pizzas the gorilla is selling.

When you have a headache, do you think you’re going to turn to the pharmacy with the gorilla outside scratching his armpits?

When you need an oil change, do you look for the gorilla stand?

I’ll have to do some research on this rich topic — and get back to you on it.

In the meanwhile, if you have any knowledge or reaction, pipe up!

Categories promotion

Useful consciousness

3 April 2011 //

In this morning’s paper there was a story about the rupture of the fuselage on a Southwest Airline 737-300 jet.

An aviation expert is quoted as saying that, in such circumstances, “At an altitude above 34,000 feet, the Southwest pilots would have had only 10 to 20 seconds of ‘useful consciousness’ to get their oxygen masks on or pass out.”

No doubt this “useful consciousness” is expert language, even jargon of the industry, but it strikes us non-experts as odd indeed. And then (it struck me, at least) as hilarious.

Of course, the expert, John Gadzinski, is talking about reaction time that a pilot would have to take crucial action. “The higher you are,” he goes on, “the less useful consciousness time you have.”

Passengers, presumably, would have just as little time to secure their oxygen masks, and one witness recounts some passengers fumbling and falling in their frantic haste to secure oxygen.

It would be good to cultivate useful consciousness, even if we can't all attain the Higher Consciousness of the wise.

But the language is hilarious, I mean, because taken out of this strict expert context, and tucked into an everyday sphere of discourse, it might suggest that most of us are flying most of the time with little “useful consciousness.” We’re flying by the seat of our pants, perhaps. We’re not straightening up and flying right. We’re on autopilot.

What do we do in fact with this incredible gift, this blessing, of consciousness? How do we develop it, pursue it, improve on it? Do we see the world in its freshness and, yes, fresh hilarity? Or do we plod along in the ruts, in the ox carts (not airplanes) of our daily habits?

I don’t mean here to provide psychological counseling. (Who am I to suggest direction?) But to say that language reflects our habits of consciousness, and unconsciousness. (Some would say creates these habits.) And that changing our language may change our lives. Being more conscious of how we use what we use every day (language) can make a qualitative difference.

Take an obvious example. We all know people whose every other word seems to be the f word. Now if they could cut their vulgarity in half, and then replace that half with words and phrases more appropriate, or more exact, even if they are measures of the anger and frustration the speakers may be feeling, this new verbiage may reflect / create changes in the life. They will begin feeling, and being perceived as, not quite so angry, marginal, out of the loop.

Or, another example, take an engineer who, proud of his expertise, her mastery of arcane lore, has no idea when he speaks to laymen and press that he’s using insider language. Every other word is not a swear word but a tech word, and he baffles us as much as the angry, obscene speaker may.

In less dramatic instances, consider just about any business brochure or website you come across. If it’s not full of jargon, it uses stale language, the hard crusts of yesterday’s banquets. Old scraps that should’ve been thrown out with the garbage long ago.

A local academic, who advises watershed districts (one of my clients is the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District), has set up a Watershed Game workshop in which participants “learn how their choices can prevent adverse impacts.”

Oh my, my, my. Save us from the adverse impacts of such game playing! From the dents in the head we’re sure to receive from such bruising jargon! How can someone who talks like this, expert as he may be, lead games? He has forgotten how to play with language, for sure, and language creates, if it doesn’t just reflect, our reality.

Well, you say, business is business, and we’re in the business of selling, not making bread or art. People care only what you say, not how you say it.

Which is true enough, at the surface anyway.

But don’t we all want to sell — and buy — something fresh and new? No matter if it’s a commodity, or a highly rare or technical service, we want the sizzle with the steak. And cliches don’t sizzle. Jargon doesn’t compel with its aroma. It beats us into submission, into the hematomas of the everyday workday. Yes, sure, it adversely impacts us, rendering us if not dead then on life support!

Useful consciousness, at last. Isn’t that what we’re after in business as in life?

Tags purpose, useful consciousness

Categories discourse, jargon

Literacy: its own reward?

22 March 2011 //

It’s easy to be cynical in these cynical times, surrounded, as we are, by various illiteracies:

Pop culture, with its contempt for age and authority
Commercial culture, with its money as the end-all-and-be-all
Hedonist-nihilist culture, with its lack of connection to anything larger than an orgasm

As someone trained in language and literature, I might be expected to have my nose down in a book. (Or up some other part.) Book! What’s that? Book! What’s that for?

Earnest, playful, dreaming, ideal, will kids grow up to read? Or will they be absorbed in mindless pleasures?

A retired friend who taught for a living reads voraciously. He reads novels, history, sociology, religion, science. He reads to get ahead, could be, which may be, deliberately, behind where the rest of us are going. Chris gives me a flying precis of the last half dozen books he’s read, then throws up his hands, and asks, “But, really, what use is reading?”

Doesn’t it improve the mind? I say.

Maybe it’s a process rather than product? I suggest. A process that generates a bit of light in this time of so much darkness? A bit of cool in this time of so much heat?

It’s not my intention here to talk about politics. (It only increases the temperature, quenches the light.) Or to mention religion, either. (Its effects are similar.)

I’d like, rather, just to pose a question. Does reading do anything? Does it have any uses? Or is it, well, just beautiful, fantastical, airy, impractical, platonic, archaic, feckless?

Do individuals need reading? Do businesses? And to what end? And to what purpose?

Are those of us who read, for duty and, yes, pleasure more than a little like the Libyan rebels, holding back the forces of brutality and darkness?

(As Hemingway said, in another connection, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”)

Tags literacy, reading, usefulness

Categories literacy

Think outside the box: really outside the box!

2 March 2011 //

Derek Diedreksen's Gypsy Junker invites you to think outside the box!

Well, we’re all so busy thinking outside the box these days — that’s the exhortation, isn’t it? — that we fail to see the box we’re trapped in. The box of cliches, jargon, obscure Latinisms, and boxed-in thinking in general.

Seems like a loony in Massachusetts has set about to right this problem — in a nouveau-Thoreauvian way.

In Walden, Thoreau opined that a man might live with dignity in a house the size of a railroad storage box, the kind he saw beside the tracks at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, the kind that held RR supplies, I suppose. Thoreau was keeping his tongue in cheek, as usual. He was full of wit and banter about the follies of his fellow man, whose misfortune it was, he asserted, to be trundling down life’s road with his house and all his possessions on his back.

We don’t have to be a follower of Thoreau or know much about him to see that he makes some kind of paradoxical sense at least. (Do you think he’d have many followers on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook, now that it’s the popular thing to do, the boxy kind of thing we seem to seek?) We stress quantity so much, that is, that we forget about quality. Qualify of life, if you will. (Argh, I hate that phrase!) Or quality of time and space to inhabit and explore.

A recent New York Times article shows that Thoreau has a follower and friend in contemporary Stoughton, Massachusetts, a fellow named Derek Diedreksen who is into thinking outside the box. You see, he has been constructing in the back yard of his modest two-bedroom house a series of “micro-shelters” that he calls the Gypsy Junker, the Hickshaw, and the Boxy Lady. Like Thoreau with his cabin, Diedreksen has made his constructions out of materials he’s scavenged or bought on the cheap. Each has cost him less than $200. (In Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out his expenses for boards, nails, mortar, etc. penny by penny.)

Of the Gypsy Junker, the largest of the three structures, Diedreksen says, “Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book [about the micro-structures] and my designs. … There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room.”

So there you have it. If you really want to think outside the box, get thee to a micro-structure if not a nunnery. All that breathing the shallow air of white-walled rooms will do you in. Guaranteed!

Tags creativity, jargon

Categories creativity, jargon, structure

Savvy, humble, and willing to commit

28 February 2011 //

This is sad, friends, and true. I’m at an age where I read the obits for pleasure. (Thank God it was them, not me.) And look at the job ads, too, with wonder.

This morning I ran across one that, like so many others, seems to have been written by a robot.

Among other impossibilities, it called for an account executive who was “savvy, humble, and willing to commit.”

Isn’t this like asking for a 40-year-old virgin?

If you’re savvy, friend, you’re not going to be particularly humble.

And if you’re humble, you won’t be cunning and savvy.

That’s the nature of the beast.

But this bit of linguistic legerdemain is pretty common. It’s a bit you can find in all kinds of ads that ask for unique individuals who can think outside the box (including the box of cliches) — and be 100% team players (another cliche).

We need to remind ourselves how humble we must be!

In the world of thinking outside the box, we don’t say we’ll think outside the box.

In the world of team playing, we do. (We say rah! rah! rah!)

So which box do they want — creative thinking or conformity?

And how far are they willing to accommodate really new ideas?

(Rodney King, beaten by the cops, might say, “Why can’t we all just get along?” And those who are beaten and cowed by the bosses might ask the same.)

I’m not making an argument for cat fights and sabotage. Rather, I’m suggesting that real creativity may come at the price of real 100% collaboration not to mention groupthink.

How can we have it both ways?

Tags creativity, jobs

Categories creativity, jargon

The lowly possessive

2 February 2011 //

People are so freaked out about apostrophes that they misuse them: here, just because a noun has a terminal -s, the writer adds an apostrophe! "No Dogs" is simply the subject of the sentence ... and "Guide Dogs" the object of the preposition except. What the heck is that comma doing in Toilets?

There’s been a heated discussion lately, in a LinkedIn group I belong to, about the fate of the apostrophe. As in people’s right to know, a dime’s worth, the Wentworths’ property taxes.

Other languages have the possessive case, of course, but don’t have the apostrophe. Is it an atavism, a useless carry-over from a fussier age, a tax that grammarians impose on the ignorant (as the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged)?

Yes and no, I think, to all the above.

The apostrophe originated in 18th century England, at a time when grammar and spelling were being standardized. The appearance of this mark, in fact, seems to be based on a false assumption. Anglo-Saxon, the language of early England, had no such mark, but simply added an -s to a word to indicate possession. (This is the same tactic that German uses today: der Mannes Hut [the man's hat], das Weibchens Dirndl [the woman's skirt]). But, for better or worse, for the time being, we are stuck with the apostrophe to indicate possession (as well as contraction), and to omit the apostrophe is to court a low opinion among grammarians and other careful literate folk.

And as long as we’re observing these sorts of things (are observant grammarians, like observant Jews, say — and belong to a conservative tradition), let’s rehearse the basic rules.

Possessive singular

To form the possessive singular of most nouns, simply add ‘s:
- John’s hat
- Mary’s blanket
- the cat’s meow
If a noun ends in s or x or z, you can add just an apostrophe or the apostrophe plus s, depending on which sounds better or which is established usage:
- Xerxes’ armies
- jazz’s beginnings
- asbestos’s dangers

Possessive plural

To form the possessive plural of regular nouns, which end in s, simply add the apostrophe:
- the animals’ behavior [more than one animal]
- the monsoons’ predicted course [more than one monsoon]
- the foundations’ pleas [more than one foundation is pleading]
- the Joneses’ absurd pretenses
- the Swansons’ property rights
To form the possessive plural of irregular nouns, those not ending in s, add the apostrophe plus s:
- the men’s demands
- the women’s taste in fashion
- the children’s story hour

Questions, comments? Please ask or comment below.

Categories mechanics

Going viral: must we?

27 January 2011 //

It’s the sheer unrelenting uninventiveness of jargon that gets me.

The way a new word or phrase sweeps through society like a tsunami or, to use an example, “goes viral.”

A closer examination of these bits of jargon reveals metaphors that are born one day and, like flies, die that same day, as dead metaphors, though they live on and are used.

So, then, “going viral.”

A YouTube post can go viral when everyone clicks on the Internet site.

A phrase itself, like “going viral,” can go viral when everyone, suddenly, starts seeing it in print. (Do we read print anymore? Print not produced by texting?)

Yes, the metaphor, originally striking and original, dies almost immediately, becomes a dead metaphor, for few people recognize it any more as a metaphor, a simile or comparison. It’s just words, dead words, dead flies, detritus that piles up and connects us to each other in a kind of disease or diseased network.

If a bit of language, or a video, goes viral, isn’t it by definition virulent? Doesn’t it, like a virus, have the power to spread rapidly — but also to infect?

If we are infected by this virus, then aren’t we too sick?

And if we use the phrase or video, aren’t we spreading the disease?

We don’t have to be high priests of language, purists, “gloomy grammarian in … golden gowns” (thanks, Wallace Stevens), to realize that unconscious use of language makes us susceptible to all sorts of diseases. We spread the germs. We don’t realize we’re ailing. We don’t realize we’re being overtaken by these germs, even as we do their bidding, willy-nilly, the way an HIV-positive person may succumb to the virus.

If we must go viral, can we develop some consciousness of our predicament?

So that we don’t spread the jargon, the cliches, the disease indiscriminately?

(For a good example of viral hype, see BuzzFeed, the kind of contemptible tripe we’re all too used to in the infotainment sphere. For a quick consideration of how jargon corrupts, see “What Is Your Gibberish Component?”)