Jaime in Uganda

My oldest daughter, Jaime, is in Uganda now, working at a maternity centre just outside Kampala. We had fun the past few weeks watching (and helping a little) her get ready for her trip. As you can see by the photo below, she did a great job of tracking down a lot of supplies to take with her. Like most maternity centres in Uganda, and throughout Africa, there is never enough of things that we tend to take for granted here in Canada.

I've always known that Jaime was a great writer. She is a keen observer of everything around here and she sucks up information of all kinds. She's a voracious reader and listener of podcasts (remember her top 5 podcasts list?) It's been great having her living with us again for the last year, after she finished university. We would often talk about the politics, especially US politics, which she has a particular interest in. And of course, we never missed an episode of The Daily Show.

Jaime has also become a pretty intense football fan, especially the NFL - just like her Dad and her brother, Cory, who is a rabid Kansas City Chiefs fan. (Why? No idea.) It's been nice to have someone to watch the games with.

Now she's going to put all those listening, reading and observing skills to good use. She's keeping a blog called Jaime in Uganda of her adventures, and if the first few posts are an example of what's to come, it's going to be a terrific read. She has a great eye for detail and an effortless writing style that's a pleasure to read.

I've set up Jaime in Uganda on her website at www.jaimetraynor.ca. Its a WordPress blog, which I had fun putting together for her. I've just added a subscription link and you can also sign up to have new posts emailed to you, if you prefer that. But I hope you'll check out her blog, subscribe and leave some comments. I know it's going to be fun to follow and I'm sure she'll appreciate the company.

A bit of history surfaces - A Cluetrain talk turns 10

Doc Searls, one of the original authors of The ClueTrain Manifesto, came across this recently and posted it to his blog. The Manifesto was arguably one of the most influential events at the turn of the century, at least for those of us that have made their living during this information revolution we're in the middle of. (You can read the whole thing online or order a new 10th anniversary version from Amazon.)

While much of the detail has changed, this is still an important historical record. And now, as we all become immersed in the social media juggernaut which is sweeping us all along, it's perhaps more interesting than ever. I'll include the opening comments here, then you can click through to Doc's site for the complete post.

* * * *
A Cluetrain talk turns 10

Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering jewell box into which the stone of my rough self has ever been placed as a speaker. My warm up act was a symphony orchestra. While they played I whispered to my wife, ‘Not one of those musicians has played a wrong note in years. How many seconds will pass before I flub a line?’

Less than ten, it turned out. But somehow that relaxed me, and the rest of the talk went without a hitch, even though many in the audience were wearing headphones, so they could hear me translated to another language, and their reactions (some nodding, some laughing, some shaking their heads) came several seconds after I said whatever it was they were reacting to. It was weird.

I had mostly forgotten the talk, and wasn’t even sure I had put it up online anywhere. But in fact I had, right here. Since that’s inside a site that’s not indexed by search engines (my choice, so far back that I’ve only recently re-discovered that fact, explaining why nothing there ever shows up), and I don’t plan on fixing it soon (I’ve got other stuff there I really would rather not get indexed), I’ve decided to post the whole thing here in the blog. As one might expect, it was right about some things, wrong about others, set in a context that has long since changed, addressed to an audience that has mostly moved on, and with arcana that may in some cases no longer make sense. Yet I think it still says some worthwhile things that invite probing and discussion. So here goes:

Why Markets Will Once Again Consist of People
(and why this is good news for Retailing)

This speech was given on the Gala Evening/50th Anniversary Celebration of the Gottlieb Dutteiler Institute, in the Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern – Konzertsaal, Lucerne, Switzerland. The subheads were put there mostly to make it easy for me to keep my extemporizing close to the text, and to make live translation a little bit easier.

25 September, 2000

By Doc Searls

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Opening

People ask me why The Cluetrain Manifesto has 95 Theses. The reason is that Martin Luther did our market testing for us. It seemed to work for him, so we figured it would work for us.

But lately I’ve been wondering why he chose 95. I think the answer is that he was really a retailer at heart.

I figure he had 100 theses, but then decided more people would buy it if he knocked off 5 theses and offered 95 as a discount. It was kind of a sale price. Worked pretty well.

The priest

Speaking of priests, I have a friend, an Irish priest who for many years did missionary work in East Africa. After he read The Cluetrain Manifesto, he called me up and said ‘I love your book. Especially that first thesis: markets are conversations. It’s brilliant.’

I was the original author of that thesis, so this was fun to hear. But the brilliance he praised was his, not mine.

Village market story

This became clear when he told me the story of a visiting friend he once took to a traditional African village market. His friend wanted to buy a rug displayed in one of the merchant’s stalls. With the priest serving as an interpreter, the customer asked for the price. When merchant responded, the customer said, ‘That’s too much,’ and began to walk away.

The priest then explained to his friend that he had insulted the merchant. So they turned around and went back. The customer then indicated that he wanted to go ahead and buy the rug for the stated price. Now the merchant became upset.

The priest now told to his friend that he had insulted the merchant twice – first by refusing to discuss the value of the rug, and second by offering to pay full price. The customer was completely confused. Clearly he didn’t know how to buy a rug in this town.

Then the priest said to his friend, ‘What do you think the rug is worth?’ The friend responded with a number, and a conversation between the three parties followed.

After a while the customer arrived at both an education about the rug and a price everybody agreed was fair.

The point: markets really are conversations

Now this, the priest told me, is an example of how markets really areconversations. In traditional markets like this one, the only way for a seller and a buyer to discover the true value of the seller’s goods is together – by talking about them and coming to an agreement.

In other words, all value is discovered inside aconversation.

This is why the idea of a fixed price set by a merchant is as silly as talking to oneself. It makes no sense. In traditional markets like this one, conversation starts with the merchant’s asking price. It doesn’t end there.

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To read the rest of Doc's speech, go to The Doc Searls Weblog.)

The case for getting rid of tenure. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine

I have a good friend who is trying to get tenure right now at a Canadian University, so this article was of interest. In principle, I'd say I support tenure - but in practice, I'm not so sure it's the right way to protect and promote academic freedom and discourse. The article does a good job (to my mind) of laying out the various arguments, although with a bias towards doing away with the practice.

Here's an excerpt:

The most common pro-tenure argument is that it protects academic freedom. Once a professor gains tenure, the thinking goes, he or she can say anything without fear of being fired. Academia thrives on the circulation of dangerous ideas. The problem is, for every tenured professor who's liberated at age 40 to speak his mind, there are dozens of junior professors terrified to say anything the least bit controversial, lest they lose their one shot at job security for life. Academia relies on young scholars to shake things up. Yet tenure incentivizes them not to. Instead, it rewards students who follow in the footsteps of the elders whose favor they will require when the day of judgment arrives.

I have a feeling this debate is going to become more vocal, especially as the current "old guard" continue to retire and new talent assumes the senior positions.

The case for getting rid of tenure. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine:

PS - I found this via @dbarefoot on Twitter, who says to be sure to read the comments on the article.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

I am one of those who believe that as a society, we are going to learn to live with the transparency of the Internet. Eventually, we won't hold those crazy things we did as youths against the young men and women who we are hiring for jobs as adults. We'll look at the person they've become and judge accordingly.

Nice sentiment. But as I look around these days, I'm less sure about that position.

The Shirley Sherrod debacle, (not long after the Helen Thomas story) the "holding public figures to higher standards" arguments and the simple "make an accusation even if it doesn't stick" strategy of debate give me pause. Past actions, no matter what they are, are available and ready to be exploited. And it looks like they will be used that way.

If anything, my concerns were amplifed today, with the death of Daniel Schorr. Everyone seems convinced that the integrity and commitment to fairness that he demonstrated died with him. Or so it might seem.

Today, I came across this article, The Web Means the End of Forgetting from the New York Times. It's a well written piece that looks at the impact that our never-to-be-forgotten actions may have down the road, given the nature of our emerging digital age.

It offers a perspective that may influence your view of what's likely to happen.

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

The issue, of course, is that even if we accept that the Internet is going to extract a high price for those pictures being posted on Facebook these days, it does nothing to solve the problem. Kids will be kids, as they say, and I doubt very much that they'll stop doing the things that kids do - nor do I think that we necessarily want them to.

Those "spirited" children, full of endless energy, enthusiasm for life and curious about everything are a handful to deal with when they're young. But they often turn into some of our most interesting people as they age. We want them to explore life, push the boundaries and test their own limits. That's what growing up is all about. If we start warning them about the long-term consequences of their actions and force them to rein in all that natural enthusiasm, we'll pay a larger price as a society.

Now I really don't know what to think about the future. I'd welcome your comments.

Flickr photo via Rafael Robayna

When good TV shows go bad - its criminal

I don't know why but I've always been interested in criminal profiling, like the types developed as a speciality by the FBI. Lately, the genre has been turned into entertainment by shows like Criminal Minds, which feature the antics of a group of FBI profilers.

I suspect I am attracted to the genre because I like logic and I like to see it used in action. I like things to fit together and its fun when someone figures out how things work. And let's face it, there's a bit of the "carny" aspect to profilers. They look at a bunch of things and then start drawing a portrait of what the serial killer looks like and how he thinks and what he might be thinking. And sometimes they seem to be right.

When Criminal Minds first began, I was impressed. The writing was good and the characters were a lot of fun to get to know. But something bad has happened to the series - to the point where I can't even watch it now. When it began, we didn't know any more about the killers than the team did. We watched as they gathered clues and put together the story, while we followed along. There was the usual license taken with space and time and technology, but in general, the episodes were character driven and smartly done.

But now, the show has degenerated into a silly parody of itself. We are usually shown the killer right off the bat and watch while the team makes improbable connections to come up with the answer that we knew about all along. And the characters are caricatures of themselves. It's hard to believe they can take seriously the lines they're forced to repeat. It must be frustrating as an actor to see your character turned into a cartoon-like dummy.

That little rant on Criminal Minds is my way of backing into an article I came across on FBI profiling in The New Yorker, posted on writer Malcolm Gladwell's website. (By the way, the New Yorker Archive of articles he's done for the magazine over the last 14 years is a real treasure-trove of interesting stuff.)

The article is called Dangerous Minds and it delves into the history of criminal profiling. It was written back in 2007 but I haven't come across it before. It starts off with a look at some famous profiling success stories and the people who were a part of them. But as it moves along, you begin to realize that those successes are not all they appear to be.

As Gladwell develops his theme, you realize how much of what is going on can be likened to the type of thing that an accomplished "psychic" can do by asking questions and refining their probing based on the answers they receive. When its done well, just about anyone can start to believe that the person is coming up with genuine insights.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the "statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite." ("I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.") The Jacques Statement, named for the character in "As You Like It" who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, "If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger." There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that "leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific." ("I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?") And that's only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

The article got me thinking about the nature of profiling and certainly raised some interesting questions. In many ways, it mirrors the evolution of the TV show spawned by it. What starts off as a convincing demonstration of some clever insights turn start to look tired and less convincing the more you know about it.

The changing face of TV News

Global became the second national TV network in Canada to announce that a woman will be taking over the anchor chair in the coming months.

Veteran journalist Dawna Friesen will become the new anchor, taking over from Kevin Newman.

That comes on the heels of the news that Lloyd Robertson is retiring next year and will be turning over his anchor desk at CTV to Lisa LaFlamme.

It's a change that seems obvious enough but it took awhile. Personally, I'm looking forward to the new faces. I don't watch TV news that often but I think the changes will only benefit the programs.

The next question is what's going to happen at CBC? Peter Mansbridge has been there a long time. Sooner or later, they're going to need a new anchor as well.

Millions of starlings swarm over Rome

Sometimes you come across something that makes you say, "Hey - this is pretty cool!"

This video is like that.

I came across it on the 37signals blog.

Alan Traynor 1912 - 2010

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Parksville to celebrate the end of an amazing era. My Dad's 98-year-old brother - my Uncle Alan - died awhile ago. This Saturday the Traynor clan is gathering for his memorial service.

Alan was the last remaining of the five Traynor brothers. They were orphaned in 1917 and raised by a remarkable young woman who kept them all together.

Alan was a gentleman and a grand patriarch. I was lucky to have gotten to know him well in recent years and I treasure the visits we had.

And to die at 98, in your own bed, with all your faculties and surrounded by loved ones is a pretty good way to go.

Farewell Uncle Alan.

Oil in the Gulf - 2 months later

The Big Picture has some amazing photos of the disaster in the Gulf. After two months, it seems worse than ever. Here's the link: http://r2.ly/zkb3.

Tonight, on the longest day of the year, I sat and watched Venus in the Western sky, shining impossibly bright after sunset. It will do that long after we're gone. And the sun will rise and set. And perhaps, down the road, we'll forget about this disaster. But at the moment, it's hard to believe we ever will.

IABC 2010 in Toronto

I've arrived at the IABC 2010 International Convention in Toronto. Things actually got underway for many earlier today, but I was up north over the weekend with my brother's family, so I didn't arrive until later this afternoon.

For me, the conference is off to a great start. The opening session featured The Drum Cafe, an enthusiastic group that uses drumming to get everybody into the corporate sharing mood. It's a lot more fun than it sounds and if you've got a corporate gig coming up and you need a way to motivate your team and get them all marching to the same drumbeat, these guys are a natural.

The opening session this evening was at the Royal Ontario Museum. What a gorgeous museum. I haven't seen it since the renovations. We were able to see the Chinese exhibit, but most of the galleries were off limits. I think I'm going to make some time this week to go back and spend a few hours wandering around. Who knows when I'll get another chance.

What was wonderful about the reception was meeting all my old work buddies and good friends from IABC Toronto. I haven't seem most of them since I left - which is now four years ago. It's hard to believe that I haven't been back since, but that's they way life flies by, I guess. We all still look great of course.

The conference is going to be a lot of fun for me this week. I'm looking forward to it.