Author Archives: Steve Mays
I don’t own a suit
I bought my first suits in 1971. A gray one and and brown one, both in a nice polyester blend. I was getting ready to start my ill-fated career as a U. S. Postal Inspector and the suits were exactly what you’d expect a fed to wear.
A year later I was a small town radio guy and the suits were traded for Hawaiian shirts and Levis. It was a dozen years before I again needed a suit. All the managers at Learfield wore suits in 1984. Even when calling on an affiliate radio station in Tarkio, MO.
Over the next 15 years or so, I accumulated about a dozen suits that you’d have to examine closely to tell one from the other. They’ve been hanging in my closet since I tunneled out of the executive suite and into cyberspace several years ago.
Today I loaded them up and took them to the local Goodwill. And it felt great. Oh, I’ll probably need a suit again some day (can you rent a suit?) But for now, it’s business casual on the dressy end and Hawaiian shirts and Levis the rest of the time.
Adam Bryant’s interview with Guy Kawasaki
Excerpts from Adam Bryant’s interview with Guy Kawasaki:
- “I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen.”
- “We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information.”
- “Make yourself dispensable — what greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you?”
- “You should conduct first- and second-round (hiring) interviews by phone, not in person.”
- “(Business schools) should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations.”
That last bullet is my new objective. If you get a longer email from me, remind me of this post.
Truth 2.0
Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:
- “An online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it — or watching it on video. Picture this: It’s last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
- A .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be — both political and corporate — have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it’s a feature.
- Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
- In the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.
Some won’t make it to the new world
Michael Wolff speaking at MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit in London:
“The chickens are coming home to roost. Most of the people who run traditional media will not be the people to step in to this new world.
“There is a line and people are not going to get over it. It used to be, up until 18 months ago, ‘there is a line but I hope I get to retirement before I cross that line’. This recession has meant people really understand that they won’t.
“It’s been happening since before the internet – it’s not because of it.
“Every big-city newspaper in the U.S. is either in bankruptcy or will be in bankruptcy in the foreseeable future – that’s 12 months. The newspaper industry in the U.S. is over.
“This has happened again and again and again in every industry – new technology has come along, and you just can’t make the change; it almost inevitably never happens. It’s easier to start with people who have no historical bias.
“If you’ve spent your career in one technology, in one business model, it’s just not efficient to have to undo that.“
I think Mr. Wolff is right and his comments [emphasis mine] remind me of a post by Jay Rosen from 5 years ago.
“An industry that won’t move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don’t have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise.