Month: June 2009

Posted on

Arlington Courthouse

These are a few pictures from the Courthouse-Clarendon area of Arlington.     When I first came into the FS, I used to walk through this area.   There were a lot of little restaurants, some pawn shops and a lot of construction.    It is very nice now.   They made a lot of progress in twenty years and Arlington has done a very good job of transit oriented development.  

This is the memorial tree to the boys of Arlington killed in World War I.  Of course, back then they only had one world war so it didn’t have a number.  It says the tree was planted in 1923.  It doesn’t seem old enough.  I wonder if it was replaced.

Posted on

ONE Common Man v THE Common Man

The interactive or social media is the future of public diplomacy, but it has the capacity to lead us down lots of blind alleys.  Much of this aimless wandering can be avoided if we just don’t make the error of mistaking ONE common person for THE common person.  Let me explain.

We group things and people in order to simplify and understand our world and we use shorthand phrases, such as the people of country X to describe very large groups that may have little in common with each other.    Marketers, politicians and public diplomacy professional want to reach THE people. The trouble is there is no such thing.  No matter the rhetoric, smart marketers, politician & PD practitioners know this.  That is why we study polling and demographic data.  We try to segment the audience in terms that make sense for our persuasion job. 

We know that in any given population, only a small percentage of the people really care about any particular issue enough to get the facts or develop opinions about it and an even smaller number will leverage the opinions of the larger population.  These influential people are NOT a random sample of the population.  They are people with specific interests, communications skills and access to persuasion methods.  The problem is finding them, especially because you have to find different ones for different occasions.    

The advent of interactive social media does not solve this problem.  Although it empowers us to move much faster, sometimes we might just be moving faster down the path to nowhere and the fastest way to go nowhere in PD is to wrongly identify a representative audience as an influential audience.   A representative sample of 1000 people might be sufficient to accurately measure the attitudes of a millions, but it won’t suffice to influence a change in those attitudes.   On the other hand, 1000 influentials could indeed affect the course of the nation. 

Social media at once reveal and obscure this reality.    We can graphically watch the spread of information on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and see the power of opinion leaders.  We knew they were out there but to a long time public diplomacy guy, actually seeing them is as amazing as really seeing gravity or magnetic waves would be for a physicist.  But it is more complicated.   Physical forces don’t exercise options or free will; people do.  Physical particles always react the same way; people don’t.   A physical object cannot just lose interest in gravity and stop exerting influence.   People … you get the picture. 

I have noticed a hazardous trend in public diplomacy.   We have started to become much more interested in numbers counted than in influence achieved.   Maybe that is because we can so easily generate numbers with our new technologies, while influence is nearly impossible to quantify.   Numbers can talk, but they don’t always tell the truth and they never tell the truth unless surrounded by an explanatory context.   For example, is it better to reach 1000 people or 100,000 people?  You really cannot answer that question until you know the context. 

Let me illustrate with my own number fallacy.   I fell into it when I started to use Facebook.  It is an embarrassingly simple error, but I have since seen it widely.   Social media is about friends.    The average Facebook user may have 500 friends.  So if my Facebook message reaches 500 people, can’t I just multiply by 500 and claim that my audience was 250,000?   And by that logic, I would only need 2000 people to reach a million.  My job just got a lot easier.  Of course, friends’ networks overlap.   In some communities, the overlap might be 90%+. 

In other words, by reaching one or two, you have already bumped up against boundary of your influence.   Adding hundreds or thousands more from the same group may not add any value at all.  The total number is meaningless. It is like saying that you want infinity and being disappointed that you had to settle for half of it.

BTW – Business Week has a very good article about what an online friend is worth. 

We used to call them boutique programs.  They are the kinds of things you set up for an ambassador or a VIP to give him/her the flavor of an issue or area.    For example, the VIP talks to a youth audience and leaves with the impression that he/she has met THE youth.  He/she has, in fact, spoken maybe sixty people, most of whom know each other (i.e. their communities overlap).  It is a very useful exercise, as long as you know what you are getting into and when you leave the boutique you go to talk to opinion leaders and people who can make connections.  Then maybe look carefully at some polling data.   

You should stay out of the boutique if you think you are getting anything more scientific than a personal impression.  Boutique programs are easier to do online and easier to fall into than they are in non-virtual life.  So remember whether online or in person, meeting ONE common person, or even fifty or a hundred of them, is not the same as meeting THE common person.

Posted on

Working Hard/Hardly Working

I admit that I have a pretty sweet deal.  I like most of the things I do at work.  In fact, I would pay to go to many of the meetings and conferences they pay me to attend.  I am not saying it is all great, but the good things far outweigh the negatives.   I think about my job a lot, but that is hard to place in the “work” category, since if I didn’t have this job I would probably be studying many of the same things re new media, persuasion and knowledge management. 

I purport to put in long hours. I rarely get home before 7 or 8 pm, which means that I spend around 10 hours at work, but what is work?  And I can usually carve out time during the day for exercise etc.  I have only recently come to terms with this.  I used to feel guilty and lazy.  I couldn’t understand how I could be doing okay w/o working very hard. But after almost than twenty-five years of decent progress, I had to rethink this. Something seemed to be working.

Most people think or at least say that they are busy.   Much of this is self inflicted work.   Every day I see people doing things that need not be done or doing things in such a way that they actually create more work for themselves and others.   But the biggest reason people think they are busy is that they are fooling themselves. 

WSJ had an article about that, giving some scientific backing to my observation.   When people are asked how much they work, they invariably come up with significant higher hours than when they follow it closely with a diary.   Some of this comes from the definition of work, as I mentioned above.   I read the WSJ, Economist and many other such publications.  I could not do my job if I didn’t keep up with the latest news and innovations.  But what % of that can I call work?  Most our high estimates of work hours comes from giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We might think that we usually work ten hour days and count the times when we work less as unusual exceptions.    But maybe there are more “exceptional” than “normal” days.

We have to remember that “normal” doesn’t mean typical or average.   It means the way something would be under good conditions.   A normal man would be healthy, not overweight and not deformed in any significant way.  This is not a typical or average man.   (BTW – an “average” man has less than two legs.  Think about it.  Nobody has more than two legs and some people have less, so the average is less than two.  Statistics can be interesting.)  IN that respect a normal day might be one where you worked through the day w/o important interruptions arriving and leaving on time.  There are not many normal days.

In respect to work, you have to consider both typical and normal. My first job in the FS was as public affairs officer in Porto Alegre. I was ambitious and worked hard, but I was distressed when I talked to colleagues who seemed a lot smarter and harder working.   My results were usually better than typical, but never up to what I considered normal. Life was too easy and I was sure I was just not doing something everybody else was doing.  I worried about this through my next posts, until I figured out that most people just think they are busier than they are and all the talk about constant work is just people talking. Pointing this out to people does not make me universally popular and I have to qualify the statement.  There are some times when you are truly busy, but most of the time not. Beyond that, if you are consistently working more than nine hours a day, and I am not talking about just being there but really working, you are burning out.  It is like trying to sprint through a Marathon. The results matter and sometimes LESS “work” will produce better results. 

I am not making a plea for indolence but I am very suspicious of people who claim to work 70 hour weeks all the time. I think there is a lot of useless energy spent and probably a lot less time on task than they say and probably than they think.

There is some virtue in doing less, especially if you find the points of maximum leverage and then use them. It is often better to clear obstacles than to push harder.   All good leaders should be a little lazy, create the proper conditions for the success of others and then get out of the way.   People need to be free to innovate and do things their way.  Constant hectoring will just give you a sore throat, make everybody less productive and create a lot of work for everybody.

Anyway, I put my time in at work and try to earn my salary, but I know that sometimes it is best to do less but do the right thing.

This story is tangential but it applies.  This guy has a clogged pipe. He called the plumber who says that he can fix the problem, but it will cost fifty dollars.  The guy agrees.   The plumber takes out a little hammer, walks to a place along the pipes and taps it a couple of times.    Everything is fixed.   The guy is outraged.  “Fifty dollars,” he says, “for a few taps?  I want an itemized bill.”   The plumber writes out a receipt.   “Tapping the pipe – $.05.  Knowing how and where to tap – $49.95.”

Posted on

Another Day’s Useless Energy Spent

IMO at least half the time people spend working is wasted.   Of the remaining half, about a quarter is actually counterproductive and only the remaining three eighth is usefully employed.    This is not scientific and it varies from time to time and person to person.  But this accounts for how people can be busy all the time and yet produce so little.

This fact came to me when I was walking up my street and saw the pruning job on the tree across from my house.    This tree needed to be pruned.    There was a crack in one of the big side branches.  But as a casual glance at this picture shows, much of the pruning effort was wasted and some actually is damage.   You can see this clearly in something like this tree, but you know this is happening all the time in other walks of life.

The tree will recover and after some years it will look good again.    People will say that the effort was worth it.    But it won’t be true.   It will have recovered from damage done.    Just because the damage is not permanent doesn’t mean it was a good thing.  It is too easy to take credit for something that would have happened naturally, even sometimes for things that would have happened naturally sooner if somebody had not messed with it.

I had an argument with a computer technician a few years back.  He “fixed” my computer and it was slower.   He patiently explained to me that I just didn’t understand the usefulness of his efforts.  Maybe he was right.   But I told him that my philosophy was simple.   If it made it easier and better to use my computer, it was good.  If it made it harder or worse to use my computer, it was bad.  If it did neither of these things, it was a waste of time.    I don’t think this guy really knew what he was doing and tried to hide his incompetence behind a wall of ostensible effort.   It happens a lot.

How much of our daily work could we just not do w/o any negative outcome?   We should just stop doing it.  How much is actually creating more useless work for ourselves and others?   There is a line in the ancient Book of the Tao, “In the pursuit of success, something is added every day; in the practice of Tao every day something is dropped.”  Sometimes it makes more sense to do less or maybe do nothing.    

It is hard to do that in today’s world where we can often not measure outputs or outcomes and so we give credit to inputs or what looks like activity.  But look again at the two trees. I prune the one on the left, but I only prune what I can do with my hand tools and I don’t do much. I look at it for a long time and then I cut as little as I think I can.  I also cut early.  I got the lower limbs when I could still do it with a hand trimmer. Total inputs are low because I am lazy.  Isn’t lazy sometimes better? 

Posted on

Folk Life

We have had torrential rains in the past month.   It makes the grass grow and everything green but it is a little gloomy.

I passed these guys at work with a portable saw mill in front of the Smithsonian.    The tree was damaged in storms.  They cut it down but instead of taking it away, they piled the logs in the middle of the lawn.   Now I see why.   They told me that they will use the boards to make benches for the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival later this month. 

This year’s festival is going to feature South American music and Wales.   They have lots of good festivals on the Mall and later in the summer they hold a farmer’s market near the Dept of Agriculture. 

Posted on

President’s Speech & New Media

The State Department is a unique organization with unique needs.   It is tempting to emulate success management and media techniques of successful private firms (what would Google do?).   We can and have learned much from them, but the USG is the only organization with the worldwide presence, reach and responsibilities.   Who and what we are and the fact that we represent the United States of America enhances our opportunities and constrains them.     We saw this at work in the Cairo speech PD effort.

All forms of traditional media carried President Obama’s Cairo speech and we in PD can no more take ownership for that than a rooster can claim credit for the sunrise.  My organization – IIP – added an interactive twist of the new media with tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users, IIP’s multimedia interactive platform,   CO.NX, interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.   The Digital Outreach Team communicated with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic.  We posted also contextual information and the speech translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.  In addition to serving overseas posts, America.Gov also carried the speech in English and the languages mentioned above for readers worldwide.

I believe that this was the first time this robust mix of new media technologies in so many languages was applied for an event worldwide.   Tell me if I am wrong. But I feel a bit like a guy who has just won the lottery.   It makes me feel great, but don’t think that we can count on that particular strategy to produce similarly happy results regularly far into the future.  Not every event will be a important as this one and the test of our online communities will be seeing how they do with less exciting things.

Posted on

Lindens Again

There is a grove of fragrant lindens around the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial. I passed them on my way to work this morning, so I stopped and got a few pictures.  

Posted on

Sweet Smell of Memory

This is the season for the smell of linden. It is a pleasant but elusive fragrance. The strange thing is that if you get really close to the blooms, you cannot smell them.  The fragrance overwhelms the senses in such concentrations.  That means that you can only catch a whiff on the breeze. It is a very Central European smell.   I remember it from my first visit to Germany.   The lindens are so prominent and pungent in Poland that they named their seventh month (our July) lipiec, which comes from their name for linden. 

In Northern Virginia we have a variety of introduced European lindens.   Fashion affects trees too and you could probably date neighborhoods by the mix of trees.  Many of the lindens we see today were planted twenty or thirty years ago.  Since then, zelkovas, pears and various kinds of cultivars I don’t even recognize have been more in style.  

The American versions of lindens are basswoods.   They are taller than their European cousins but the flowers are less conspicuous and the scent is there but a little less apparent.   Basswoods don’t grow around here naturally; at least I have never seen one.   We are just past the edge of their range.  They are more common farther north and throughout the Midwest and they are very familiar in southern Wisconsin, where they tend to team up with sugar maples and – near lake Michigan but not inland – beech trees to form climax forests any place where the soil is deep enough.

Bees are fond of basswood flowers, which bloom in June and July. There is even a specific kind of honey made from basswood nectar.

Smell is persistent in memory and the linen smell brings back so many for me.  I remember the lindens were blooming when I went to Minneapolis for my MBA in June 1983 and even today the smell brings back those memories.  I bet I could do statistics better under a linden tree. There were a couple big basswood trees on the road from Chrissy’s family farm in Holmen and that image pops back too at the smell of the lindens.   But the most interesting memory connection comes from my visit to Germany in 1979.  When I smell the lindens, sometimes I can taste the beer.   Sense memory is complex. Evidently the sense of smell is tied closely to the emotional memory in the amygdala.  I am sure somebody has done scientific studies that explain it but I don’t feel like looking it up.

Someday I will plant a garden with lindens, lilacs, marigolds, hawthorn, honeysuckle, lavender & jasmine.  Those produce the nicest smells.

Posted on

The President’s Speech

My colleagues and I have been working hard to get the President’s speech in Cairo out on new media.   We are breaking new ground.  No private firm is as worldwide as the U.S. State Department.   It is exciting.  I don’t often write so directly about my work, but I think this time it might be appropriate, since even the NYT noticed us.  This is what I have been doing all day. 

 Interacting with President Obama“Be among the first to get highlights of U.S. President Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo and tell us what you think.   Go to  http://www.america.gov/sms.html  and be part of the action.”  That is the tweetable text telling mobile users worldwide how they can be part of President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo. 

President Obama’s June 4 speech will certainly be carried on traditional media all over the world and the U.S. State Department will add an interactive twist, using new media tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users as well as interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.   This is in addition to outreach efforts by a digital outreach team, communicating with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and translations and more traditional webpage posting of the speech in Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.

Those interested in interacting can participate in several formats.   They can comment on blogs at (http://blogs.america.gov), join a social network (http://www.america.gov/communities/social-networks.html), chat and watch a live webcast (http://www.america.gov/multimedia/askamerica.html) or comment via mobile using the Clickatell system. 

Interest so far is significant.    The chat room, for example, already had more than a thousand participants signed up, some of them lurking inside a couple days in advance.  The mobile/Clickatell experience will represent the first time a President has been fully interactive on a mobile platform from an international location.  The new media allows a greater connection with people.  I think we got it right this time.  Gotta be here tomorrow at 5:30.  Tomorrow will tell.

Posted on

The Intelligence of Crows – Odds & Ends from May 2009

Animals that Thrive with People

My observation has been that crows are the smartest birds.    This link is an interesting talk about crows and how fast they learn and adapt. 

Crows get along well because of people.  They like to live near where people live.  We try to get rid of them, but can’t.    They proliferate.  The same goes for seagulls, coyotes, geese, deer, pigeons and lots of others.   We also have the invasive plant species such as multiflora rose, dandelions, paradise trees and Japanese honeysuckle. 

Below is Japanese honeysuckle growing up my pine trees.  Above is paradise tree.  We have been battling them since we got the farm. 

Plastic Poles

I noticed that the light post was made of plastic.   You cannot tell until you get close.  They used to be concrete or metal.  I suppose plastic has advantages.   It doesn’t rust; it is easily molded and is light weight, so it is easy to move and work with.    I vaguely object to the use of plastic, although I really cannot think of too many good reasons. Maybe they are made of recycled garbage bags and coke bottles. 

 Big Trees

I just like the nice big oak tree.  You can tell it has grown out in the open.   They planted oak trees in Arlington in fifty or sixty years ago.  It was a good, forward looking policy.

John Ford

TCM is having a John Ford film festival.   I am very fond of John Ford films.     They can be corny but also inspiring.   I like the use of traditional music and the way he paints scenes. 

My favorite John Ford movies are “The Searchers,”  “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” & “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”  One of the things I like about his movies is perhaps what some others find tiresome.  He goes with similar themes and the same teams of actors.   John Wayne, Ward Bond, Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson as well as a passel of others whose faces I recognize but names I don’t know.   It feels like meeting with old friends.    He also films in iconic places, such as Monument Valley.  

Above are some daisies on the farm.  Below is a heavy rain storm outside my work.