Category: Uncategorized

So about this whole Frienditto thing.  (Ed. Note 2022: Frienditto was a service that could create a public archive of any LiveJournal post a user could see, thus effectively making public material the original poster had intended to be friends-only.  There was consternation.)

While I agree with the sentiment that it’s a bad idea to assume that anything on the Internet is private, there’s a separate issue which the integrity of friends-locking touches on: it’s really hard to judge one’s audience reliably on the net.

I think a substantial portion of online flamewars start from the equivalent of making a snarky joke about someone at a party, only to discover that they’re standing right behind you. It’s not necessarily that you wouldn’t say it to their face, but you might say it differently if you realized they were there. On the net, everyone is there. That takes some getting used to.

People phrase things based on the audience they’re addressing; it’s nigh-impossible to write without assuming something about your readers — their interests, their positions, their hot buttons. It can be frustrating when your words drift beyond the audience you intended, because they stop communicating effectively. And frankly, it’s a pain in the ass to write for the whole world all the time.

That’s why I find the idea of Frienditto a little troubling. I don’t talk about anything I consider private behind a lock, but I do sometimes rely on the known audience of my friends list to let down my hair a bit in matters of diction. I also avoid sensitive matters in email, but I’d still be ill-pleased to see my emails published Paris Hilton-style.

Originally published on LiveJournal

As I reflect on the many creative professionals I have known, I notice a range of stances on a key issue: how to steer one’s creative ship relative to the audience.

One one end of the spectrum, you have a group I’ll call the auteurs. They take their cues from their own hearts — they produce what seems important to them, and hope there’s an audience for it. This is an attitude close to the old adage “Write what you know”; it views the creative process as essentially personal, not to be guided by outside considerations.

On the other, what I’ll call the impresarios: they study their audience, and develop projects based on what they think the audience will find useful (which isn’t always the same thing as what the audience wants). This is an attitude close to the saying “Only a fool ever wrote but for money”; success is measured by audience reception, and using a different yardstick is tantamount to intellectual masturbation.

The interesting thing is that people on either side of the midpoint tend to make concessions to the other side in their execution, if not in concept; impresarios take pride in putting their personal spin on whatever the market demands, and auteurs are often very concerned with how to position their work in the marketplace.

Me, I’m a mild auteur; I try to work on things that I think people will like, but I get no kick from contemplating the zeitgeist of consumer buying habits.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Only your mom cares how hard you tried.

There’s this thing I do, and only lately have I realized how deeply boneheaded it is. What happens is that someone will offer me a task or project that I want to take on, or reveal a new complication to a task I have already undertaken, and I will suspect that the task as currently defined may be beyond my ability to complete competently. (Not is, mind you; just may be.)

My reflexive response tends to be to sigh heavily (or its online equivalent) and say, “Well, that’s going to be really rough, but if that’s what you need, I’ll take a crack at it.” There is a part of me that then thinks that if problems arise, or things don’t work out, well, I put my cards on the table, and they know the score. I have done this a lot over the years.

This is totally dim. The fact that I usually get away with it because I’m good at deathmarching makes it no less asinine. No one wants you to do your best, they want you to do the job. They don’t want you to tell them no, but they really don’t want you to say yes and then fail. And they don’t care that you tried really hard; at best, the fact that you tried really hard and still failed just makes it awkward to yell at you.

Part of this is that I tend to assume that someone wouldn’t ask something of me if it weren’t a reasonable request. Thus, when someone asks me to do something beyond my limits, the very act of asking tends to make me think, “Well, if they think I can handle it, maybe I can. They know the nature of the task better than I do.” Thus overlooking that it is not other people’s job to gauge my limits, and ignoring the fact that people often make (intentionally or not) unreasonable requests.

I suspect my stupid tactic is also half intended, subconsciously, as a bargaining ploy to get the person offering the task to offer me more congenial terms. It doesn’t work.

I need not to do that anymore. When someone offers me a job that I think I may not be able to handle, I need to make a counteroffer rather than accepting while trying to hedge. Even when the person making the offer says they’ll owe me one if I take it on.  (Editor’s note 2021: When that person is an employee, who then moves on before you have a chance to cash that chit in, it is vexing.)  Above and beyond only counts when you succeed.

Originally published on LiveJournal

I’ve been musing on the year that was — what I did, what I saw, what I heard about — and thinking about what is to be learned from the mighty shambles that was 2004. Today, I want to talk about what I learned about delegation, and about two-thirds of it boils down to this:

Nobody likes to delegate; everybody wants a bitch.

The difference, as I see it, is that delegation means assigning a task for which you are responsible to someone else whom you trust to get it right, while having a bitch means drafting someone to be an extra pair of hands for you because you can’t be everywhere at once. Almost inevitably, bitch work is of poor quality. There are a couple reasons for this.

First of all, nobody wants to be your bitch. If you have a bitch, either you’re paying them (whether in cash or less tangible forms of satisfaction) or they don’t realize they’re your bitch yet. It’s demeaning, and your bitch will resent you for it, and this will come through in their work.

Second, bitch work rarely shows initiative. This is because people tend to disrespect their bitches’ contributions, discarding (and occasionally excoriating) their labor if it’s not done exactly the way they would have done it. Over time, a bitch recognizes this pattern and sticks to doing exactly what they’re told, checking back for further instruction whenever there is ambiguity.

I cannot count the number of people I’ve seen bewailing the low morale, high turnover, and poor performance of their organizations, never realizing that their problems are a direct result of people waking up to the fact that they had been transformed from subordinates to bitches. And yet, people still want bitches.

Part of this is that you have to trust someone’s competence to successfully delegate to them, and competence is not falling off the trees in this world of ours. But the big sticking point, I think, is that at its heart, in order to really delegate, you have to be able to look at a project you’re responsible for, and say, “I think that’s the wrong decision. But it’s your decision to make.”

Delegation can’t just be “I trust you when I’m too busy to tell you what to do”. You have to trust your delegatee *all* the time, and you have to back their plays. Every time you override them — especially when you’re overriding something they’ve done in public — you’re saying, “Nice try, but we’ll do this my way, bitch.” And the bitch spiral takes another step.

Occasionally, that may be necessary, if something really huge is at stake. But I’ve seen far too many supervisors override their subordinates every time they disagreed, and every one of them had terrible morale and occasional revolts from the ranks. It’s not worth it to screw up your organization over minor points.

Originally published on LiveJournal