Don’t interfere with the flow

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“There is a profound Buddhist doctrine that speaks of a great river that flows through all of reality. Once you have found yourself, there is no more cause for action. The river picks you up and carries you along forever after. In other words, effort from the personal level, the kind of effort all of us are used to in daily life, becomes pointless after a certain point. This includes mental effort. Once you become self-aware, you realize that the flow of life needs no analysis or control, because it’s all you. The great river only seems to pick you up. Actually, you have picked yourself up — not as an isolated person, but as a phenomenon of the cosmos. No one gave you the job of steering the river. You can enjoy the ride and observe the scenery.”

I like that. I found it in a book by Deepak Chopra (“Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul”). I’m not recommending the book (you’ll read it if you’re supposed to). But this is where I jot done some of the lines and passages that I want to remember or find again.

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Stagger Lee

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This morning my friend Bob gave me a copy of the death certificate of Lee Shelton, who died in the prison here in Jefferson City, MO, of tuberculosis in 1912. Shelton was an African American cab driver and pimp convicted of murdering William “Billy” Lyons on Christmas Eve, 1895 in St. Louis, Missouri. [More on Shelton at Wikipedia]

The crime was immortalized in a popular song that has been recorded by numerous artists. Here are just a few:

  • Grateful Dead
  • Tom Jones
  • Pat Boone
  • James Brown
  • Neil Diamond
  • Fats Domino
  • Dr. John
  • Bob Dylan
  • Duke Ellington
  • Woody Guthrie
  • Bill Haley & His Comets
  • The Isley Brothers
  • Huey Lewis and the News
  • Taj Mahal
  • Wilson Pickett
  • Sam the Sham
  • Ike and Tina Turner

You might need a Blip.fm account to listen to the two versions I’ve linked above.

The Hurt Locker

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The Hurt Locker more than lived up to its billing as an “intense” film. Black Hawk Down intense. Only the men and women who have served in Iraq (or who live there) can say how real the movie is. Real enough, I suspect.

I’m not sure the film makers had any sort of political statement to make about our presence in Iraq, but I came away thinking there is no way to win such a war. Unless the last suicide bomber blowing up the last Humvee with the last chunk of siMMtec counts as winning. Not sure what it would look like for our side.

The “can’t go home again” theme reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Rolling Thunder. I still don’t know what to make of the brief appearances by David Morse, Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce.

How flat is your organization?

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This interview with Cristobal Conde, the president and CEO of SunGard, is a good example of why I’ll be willing to pay for the New York Times, when that day comes (couple of weeks?). The Q & A covers several very basic and interesting areas and I encourage you to read the entire piece. Here are a few bits to whet your appetite:

“You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

On leadership:

“I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the leader, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

On micromanagement:

“If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.

PowerPoint:

“I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Advice to young people:

“My advice to young people is always, along the way, have a sales job. You could be selling sweaters. You could be selling ice cream on the street. It doesn’t matter. Selling something to somebody who doesn’t want to buy it is a lifelong skill. I can tell when somebody comes in for an interview and they’ve never had any responsibility for sales.”

Print this interview and slide it under the bosses door. Wear gloves and don’t get caught.

One in five radio execs social networking

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How many US radio industry executives (from the 50 largest companiues) are on Facebook or Linkedin? Here’s what the folks at McVay New Media discovered:

“Out of 116 radio executives, running the fifty largest USA radio companies, 14 of them had Facebook accounts and 19 of them had LinkedIn accounts. The most common member of the executive team to have a presence on either website was the Chief Operating Officer.”

While less than scientific –some executives are online under different names– the results raise the question:

“How can we embrace the digital direction of the industry if our leaders are not even participants themselves? Think of it this way. If it were exposed that less than one in five of radio’s C-level executives owned radios, we would significantly doubt their confidence and personal investment in the radio industry.”

“If today’s radio companies are to evolve into the digital media world, wouldn’t it first make sense for radio’s leaders to evolve into the digital media world? Clearly, many leaders in the media industry are still learning the language of digital. Yet, the fastest way to learn a new language is immersion.”

“Tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can offer any C-level executive a simple and efficient direct forum with employees, shareholders, and customers. In fact, a strong executive could use social networking to improve their company’s image, foster positive communication, and directly confront market feedback.”

Is our (Learfield) industry “headed in a digital direction?” I believe it is. Are our leaders participating themselves? Only a few and in very limited ways. I might rephrase the question:

If only 1-in-5 of our senior managers regularly attended college sporting events, would we “doubt their confidence and personal investment” in collegiate sports marketing?

The Book of Eli

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They did it. The finally made a Denzel Washington movie that completely sucked. The story is Kwai Chang Caine goes to Deadwood with a good dose of Road Warrior.

I can only assume the studio hopes the reps of Denzel and Gary Oldman will pull enough people in the first week or two to make a little money. The film could not have been expensive to shoot.

As for why two fine actors like Washington and Oldman would sign on for this… no idea.

If you’re the type that makes a mental list of “reality errors” in the movie (where do they get gasoline 30 years after the end of the world?), don’t bother. The Book of Eli has too many.

Poll: 2 in 5 Americans read paper daily

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One of the findings of an Adweek Media/Harris Poll taken in December 2009. Only 43% of US adults say they read a daily newspaper – either online or in print – almost every day, while 72% read one at least once a week and 81% read one at least once a month. The study found that one in ten adults say they never read a daily newspaper.

“Daily newspaper readership skews heavily toward the older age groups. Almost two-thirds of those ages 55+ (64%) say they still read a daily newspaper almost every day. Younger Americans read newspapers less often. Just more than two in five of those ages 45-54 (44%) read a paper almost every day as do 36% of those ages 35-44. However, less than one-fourth of those ages 18-34 (23%) say they read a newspaper almost every day and 17% in this age group say they never read a daily newspaper.

Though many newspapers are exploring the possibility of charging a monthly fee to read a daily newspaper’s content online, the poll results suggest this tactic is unlikely to work. Three-fourths of online adults (77%) say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a newspaper’s content online. Among the minority willing to pay, one in five online adults (19%) would only pay between $1 and $10 a month for this online content and only 5% would pay more than $10 a month.

The average monthly amount consumers are prepared to pay ranges from $3 in the US and Australia to $7 in Italy.

I want to be depressed by these findings but must confess that I do not read a hold-it-in-your-hands newspaper and I’ve never been better informed. I spend the first two hours of every days gobbling up news from dozens of sources. And much (most?) of the real news comes from newspapers that are bleeding red ink.

What will I be reading if/when those traditional sources are no long? I have no idea.