And it has nothing to do with the ridiculous spelling, whether it’s the LOLcats feigned ignorance, or the intentional crop-and-drop of letters. (I’m looking at you, Flickr and Tumblr.)

The mystery is in the origin of our online etiquette and morality.

Download audio file (o169.mp3)

Source of Morals

“C’mon, Ike. You’re putting us on. The online world is pretty transparent.”

You’d think. But you’d be wrong.

Truth is, the vast majority of people slide right on through life without thinking about their moral traditions. They accept them for what they are, and maybe even study them in the abstract, but for some reason the dots never get connected.

The Judeo-Christian ethic is strong throughout American culture and the establishment of our laws. There were assumptions made, steeped in intentional knowledge. We don’t have to give it more than a moment’s thought, and we can trace the lines back.

So tell me? Where is the Golden Rule in online etiquette? Where is “Love your neighbor as yourself?” The closest you might find is the Reverse Golden Rule, found in Confucian (among other) traditions:

Do not do unto another that thing that you would not want perpetrated upon yourself.

Yet, look at the panorama of what we consider to be moral issues online:

• Plagiarism
• Trolling
• Link-baiting
• Spamming
• Bullying
• Black Hat SEO
• Phishing

Some of them involve criminal components, some involve loss of time and/or sanity. But they all seem to come from a similar strand:

What if everyone behaved this way?

Categorical Imperative

That question, “What if everyone did ________?“, is the engine that drives the Categorical Imperative. It’s not designed to be applied to anything that is a subset of a larger activity. For example, if everyone ate apples, then we’d all die of malnutrition, therefore eating apples is immoral? No — because there is a larger category that covers “eating” and “nutrition.”

Here’s a better example: Would it be right to go back in time and kill a baby Adolf Hitler? The Categorical Question has nothing to do with the “results” of Hitler’s legacy, but is phrased as “Is it moral to kill an infant for crimes it has not yet committed?” Well, if we killed ALL infants before they committed crimes, humanity would end… therefore it is immoral.

Immanuel Kant’s tool is useful in environments like the internet, because its design makes it instantly applicable to emerging issues and questions. “Is it okay to Reply-All on this email sent to 500 people?” Well… what if everybody did?

Its strength is also a weakness, because of our propensity to steer by the gutter when we ought to steer by the stars. (C’mon, I know a few of you are still calling for the head of Baby Hitler.) Pragmatism and Utility make for very strong arguments these days. But from what I can see, most of the lasting issues of etiquette are being boiled down into Categorical arguments. This is new territory for us, because as a primarily Judeo-Christian culture we haven’t spent a lot of time looking at Kant. It all depends upon your perspective.

The View from on High

And if your perspective is a Mountain View…?

It’s a little shocking to me, really, that no one has asked the question of Google:

“What is Evil?”

Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” has been hailed as a guiding corporate mantra. It’s a mandate to employees, and is to guide decisions from business acquisition to trading partners to electricity consumption to serving the needs of locavores in the company mess.

But what does it mean?

One who measures morality on a Utilitarian basis might make some very pragmatic arguments about issues of access, privacy, or net neutrality. A Kantian view might differ widely. One might place value on the freedom of the individual, where the other places priority on what it encourages across the online ecosystem.

“What is Evil?“

I can’t tell you. Neither can Google. But maybe we all are telling Google as we go.

Who’s to say there isn’t a server farm in Mountain View that churns through sentiments expressed online about issues of net neutrality? That there isn’t a scorecard that goes beyond a simple “poll” of our popular opinions at the moment — but one that measures what we are doing along with what we’re saying. Maybe we’re telling Google what will keep the ‘Net running at peak efficiency, even though not a single one of us knows.

All hail the Mighty Google. The Oracle Speaks.

An Oracle that doesn’t know Good from Evil, but defines as “Evil” those things that would make the internet less efficient and useful for our purposes. It’s the Utility of John Stuart Mill, folded into a Kant sandwich.

“What is Evil, online?“

I don’t know. Neither do Sergey Brin or Larry Page. We don’t know.

But I. Kant understands the Intarwebs.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

With pitchforks and torches, the mob brought down an unresponsive and paternalistic media, that had used decades (broadcast) and centuries (print) of scarcity and monopoly to own the agenda. In record time, the mob has learned that you can’t dethrone the king without leaving a void under the crown… and lacking the sophistication to kill the Monarchy instead of the King, they have assumed the throne and become the very thing they revolted against.

We live in a real dangerous time right now. The social web has generally undermined the quality of information presented to us via news media, and now top tier bloggers beat down criticism with bullying tactics. The ethos is these bloggers should not be criticized for espousing ideas, and then marketing those thoughts publicly. When they are called to task for such acts retribution through silence, attacks, and — at its worst — flash mob abuse occurs. Like Andrew Keen predicted, the mob is ugly.

Should a blogger blog and not expect criticism and conjecture? Why has the communications blog conversation turned into a place where people become punitive if you have a differing point of view about ideas and direction, and state it publicly with a vigorous counterpoint? What happened to “conversations?”

Even those who were consciously championing Conversation as a tool of revolution and equality have fallen into the trap of equating the greatness of an idea with the greatness of the creator. The truth is we’re all prone to brilliance, and it’s amazing that so many brilliant ideas can now find the light of day and be shared. But it’s ludicrous (and somewhat hypocritical) to follow the same top-down hegemony that we supposedly usurped, and assume that the same people who published great thoughts last year and last week are the same people who will be correct with tomorrow’s notion by virtue of fiat. We have a duty to criticize an idea without being hateful to the author — and likewise, authors need to understand that public vetting of their ideas is not equivalent to personal attack.

Criticism is part of publishing your views online publicly. We feel very little sympathy for the celebrity “no negative/counter views” attitude right now. We understand it can hurt. In fact, we’ve both got quite a few scars (sometimes from each other) from scathing criticism. It made our thinking better.

The argument that it’s “not nice” to critique ideas doesn’t fly with us. Progress does not occur when we simply “quiet ourselves” and blindly accept or ignore ideas that can be considered harmful to our community’s general well-being. Further, it is better to criticize someone’s ideas to their face than to gossip maliciously behind their backs. As two bloggers who have received staunch criticism online over the years, we respect others who do this more than petty backstabbing.

Public Vetting isn’t easy, we will grant you that. It requires that you have faith in your own ideas, and can get out of bed the next day knowing that you’re no longer Perfect. That requires a coping mechanism. In healthy people, it’s Self-Esteem. In others, it is an overbearing Ego borne of puffery and delusion.

Imagine if our founding fathers had this attitude that many bloggers do — that ideas and the people owning them should not be criticized publicly. We’d be in a much worse place in the United States today.

Our Founding Fathers were willing to die for their ideas. And if they had the attitude of many of today’s bloggers and so-called “Thought Leaders,” we’d be speaking English today instead of American! (I’m only partly joking, here…)

First of all, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams — who became fast friends during the American Revolution and died best of friends, too — would never have had the rift that created our original two party system. The two went at each other with such vigorous public and private discourse one wondered if they would ever patch their union. Yet they saw it through, and in process forged a union that’s still going strong today. Similarly, the debate about our Union that occurred in the Federalist and Antifederalist papers.

America’s revolutionaries knew when to be Officers and when to be Gentlemen. We naively assume they were as civil in their discourse as they appear with their frills and wigs. Just look at how nasty they could be in a public way.

Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, we do believe these tools have great potential to impact contemporary society in a positive fashion. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. But the communications social web as a culture needs to grow up and learn how to embrace vigorous debate if that’s going to happen. Else we will see a regression in learning and thought, not progress. That would be a tragedy for the society as a whole.

We promise to do our part and keep the vigorous discourse coming. Whether its welcomed or not, and whether we are bullied or not. We believe debating ideas and positions is necessary, particularly when they are designed to create elite thought leadership mechanisms for marketing purposes.

We are grateful to those who carried the pitchforks and torches… but not so grateful for those who are pouring the boiling oil on those who are merely trying to follow you up the walls.

We are grateful for those who have shared wonderful and world-changing ideas, and continue to do so… but not so grateful to those who believe they have earned a measure of entitlement over and above the value of their contributions.

We are forever grateful for those who have shown us how we can change the world by leading from behind… but not so grateful for those who have become Pajama-clad Princes and Tyrants of the Kitchen… who get off the free WiFi just long enough to parade around the Starbucks and pretend to be royalty at conferences and tweet-ups. You grant us your Royal presence, believing that our slings and arrows will be repelled by your reputation, that our criticism will never stick to your Teflon Robes.

We hate to tell you… but you’re the Emperor of Empty… and you have no clothes.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

It’s also okay to be occasionally right.

But is it okay to be right for the wrong reasons?
Download audio file (o160.mp3)

The Road Less Traveled

I saw a promotional post touting a new social network called “Path.” Path wants to beat Facebook by being smaller. You see, Facebook is just too much, and there are too many people, and you can’t possibly know them all that well, and there are people who aren’t even people who you might not want to share things with.

I get that, I really do.

Path will limit you to 50 friends instead of 5,000, because that limits it to who really matters:

Path allows you to capture your life’s most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most.

Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal. Path is a place where you can be yourself.

I agree completely. Yet Path is wrong on two very important counts.

Done With Dunbar

Path has tapped into a very interesting sentiment, that we’re not all ready for a totally public world, and that there’s safety in the familiar. The idea of sharing with a smaller number of people is enticing, to say the least.

Where they lose me is with their attempt to use science as part of the sale.

Again, from Path’s introductory post:

We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time.  Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.

Actually, it would have been better for them to be honest:

“We chose 50 based on popular misinterpretations of the research by Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time under a given tribe-centric circumstance.

There… that’s a little better.

The alleged Dunbar Number has been pitched around so much by social media knuckleheads that you don’t even need to go to the original research. If you did, you’d be astonished at the game of Telephone that has radically altered the popular meaning.

Dunbar’s hypothesis, never proven, is that there is an upper boundary for our notion of community, based on the size of our cerebral cortex. (I’m talking humanity, not our own individual brains.) Dunbar’s idea is that the neocortex limits us to a complete understanding of a community of a given size. The “complete understanding” is the key here.

He did not say you could only have 150 friends… he said that 150 is the highest number of people you could know where you also knew all of the ways in which they interacted and knew each other.

Simply put, the Dunbar Number is the size of the high school graduating class where everyone can still be all up in everyone else’s business, and know who slept with whom, and which kids shakes down the others for help with their Geometry homework.

Path gets it wrong, horribly.

Paging Sybil

I grew up in Idaho, and have a few friends from that time in my life.

There are a couple dozen people from my church on my Facebook.

I know some really clever communicators and I share things of interest to them, and they reciprocate.

I’m connected to dozens of my close friends still doing great work for the American Red Cross, and with those who I’ve trained and trained with in Kung Fu.

But Path wants me to have 50 friends. Period.

I think it’s a mistake to try and cater to “the real Ike,” especially when half of my friends first knew me as Isaac. Yes, I am a complicated person, but aren’t we all?

Oversharing is a real issue, and it’s easy to turn people off with pictures of the vacation nobody cares about, or photos of the family members that we didn’t know you had. And it’s also a mistake to assume that my closest 50 Best Friends will all know or care, either. Because they are as fractured and multiply-enabled as I am. The Isaac who studies Kung Fu and the Ike who writes about communications does indeed overlap with the Isaac who has watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but will I need another social network for just the people who understand my analysis of Buffy’s rhetorical banter prior to delivering spinning heel-kicks?

Um… no.

There is only one me, but there are many parts to me. Why not just let me share those parts with the people who care about that part of me?

Redundancy, Once More With Feeling

Which begs the question: Why do I need Path?

I can already divide the different parts of Me among different lists. Facebook Lists are easy to set up, and I can direct church-related stuff to the flock, family pictures to the immediate family, and articles about failed social media networks to those who care.

The Holy Grail of social media will be discovering how to bake Relevance into the system. But until that pre-packaged recipe arrives on my shelf, I can still cook that from scratch for my friends, by being smarter about how I share what with whom. And odds are, you can too.

Path is a great idea, wrapped up in justifications so misguided and incorrect that I may just have to recommend the paths more traveled.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Download audio file (o148.mp3)

I saw a pair of Tweets back to back today, and they got me thinking.

At first glance, Cam and Alexis (two amazing thinkers on my “People to have coffee with one day” list) seem to be at odds. But not really. Yes, one pines for the gentility and authenticity of actual personal connection – the other coldly notes a data point that drills to a level of absurd statistical precision.

But the truth is, that’s all of us in there.

Hemispheres

Our complexity is rooted in our brains, and the wonderful division of labor in our grey matter. It includes zones of specialty that are redundant and fluid, which allow us to not just process more than one thing at a time, but to be more than one thing at a time. You can be a Marine, or an improv comic, or both. You don’t have to choose.

Yeah. Hemispheres.

With multiple processing centers running in parallel, it’s normal for individuals to be divided on issues. “My heart tells me _______, but my brain tells me _______.” Often, there is no way to resolve this Gordian knot of logic and emotion, and we’re left with another choice: cognitive dissonance, or outright denial. Strict behaviorists, by the way, will tell you to ignore the expressed thoughts and feelings, and simply watch what people do. According to the Behaviorists, those who spend all day on Facebook complaining about how Facebook is the problem with society are a part of the problem.

Looking beyond the wiring of our brains, and into the network of our relationships, Facebook is being hailed for making another step toward the Search for Relevance. The new Groups feature is supposed to mimic the way we would map our acquaintances and friends, with several large “spheres of relation.” These Hemispheres sometimes overlap, and often don’t. My loops?

• People I graduated high school with
• People I went to college with
• People I went to school with in Idaho
• People I go to church with
• People I used to go to church with
• Marketers and communicators who share great ideas
• People with interesting political beliefs
• People I worked with in TV
• People I worked with at Red Cross
• People I work with now
• People I know in Birmingham
• People I studied Kung Fu with

…and the list could conceivably go on for a while longer. I am currently using Facebook’s list feature to curate all these Hemispheres, but only 1 in 20 accounts use this feature. Facebook Groups is supposed to be the answer to bringing “relevance by segmentation” to the masses. But it will not work as advertised.

Groups and Masses

Groups seem like great ad-hoc ways to divide your online experience, so you’re only sharing things that are relevant to the people in that circle. This might be wonderful, or it might be horribly disastrous.

Let’s say someone created a Group for my fantasy football league. 16 people, we keep it nice and private, and we’re able to trash talk as nasty as we’d like without being noise in other people’s streams. That would be an effective implementation — if indeed everyone were on Facebook. Private groups would be better if there were ways for non-Facebook users to subscribe by email.

Now let’s consider the public Groups with a wider interest. What do you suppose is going to happen when someone creates a Group called “Tea Party Rally?” Or a group called “Social Media for Realtors?” Or one called “Technology for Educators?”

I see much potential for abuse, spamming, hard-core marketing pitches, and sabotage.

I also see a lot of disenfranchised and disengaged people, who were at first attracted to the oncoming rush of great ideas and insights from people with similar interests, but in the end trailed away because they lacked something.

Connection.

Corpus Callosi of Networks

In the realm of personal relationships and networks, you are the Corpus Callosum, the part that unites the Hemispheres. You are the common denominator through which all those networks flow. You grab ideas from one, and take them into another. But in order to do that, you must first be connected to the Hemispheres!

I can already subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds of various topics, find ways to weave them together, and synthesize something new and interesting. I don’t need social networks for that. What makes the social networks “special” in that regard is that I know the people there, and they know me. In a large public Facebook Group, you’re looking at too many strangers with too many mixed motives, and you’re not looking at enough of your friends.

You can’t be a nexus for so many divergent things when you’re not truly connected to them.

Which brings us back to Cam and Alexis.

Cam, the ex-Marine, reaching out for something non-clinical and emotionally real.

Alexis, marketer-by-day, improv comedienne-by-night, who shares a nugget of truth from the depths of statistical nerdery.

Both prove in a short period of time that they are more than just the sum of their interests. They are the nexus of their interests. And in their happy juxtaposition within my timeline, they yield another truth, where *I* am the nexus:

“You can’t have a relationship with a database, but databases might yield useful information about our relationships.”

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

We know it when we see it, but getting from A to G either takes a leap of faith, or relies on assumptions we never truly examine.

So I am challenging them.

There’s a lot of noise on the internet, and it’s getting even noisier. Finding the right melody among the din will become even harder. Unless, of course, you just happen to have a larger amplifier and can shout across the top of everyone else.

So what makes the good stuff “good?” And how can you build for it?

The Recipe

When it comes to online content, I have a hunch about the ingredients, but I’m not sure yet how you mix them.

The Mixing Bowl

Okay, so I have a rough idea about what goes into “Quality” online… but I don’t know how to weight it. A little bit of baking powder makes the pancakes rise, too much makes it unpalatable. And all of the attributes above impact how we perceive “Quality,” but some do matter more than others.

So tell me.

In the arena of Online Content, which attributes did I leave out?

And of the attributes of Quality, how would you weight them? Is accessibility more important than being well-written? Is commonality more crucial than surprise?

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Ever wonder what they mean?

They indicate the percentage presence and concentration of three ingredients: Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium. (N, P and K.) So a ten-pound bag of 10-10-10 fertilizer will have one pound each of N, P and K.

Ever wonder what they do?

Nitrogen enhances the production of chlorophyll, which makes the plant grow up.

Phosphorous helps the blooms and leaves reach their potential, making the plant grow out.

Potassium plays a key role in root development, helping the plant grow deep.

Grow up. Grow out. Grow deep.

Sounds like a good plan.

The Community as a Garden

Building a community is quite analogous to gardening. When done properly, it’s an organic process. Your task is to not just build, but to cultivate with an end in mind. (Are we producing fruit? Pretty flowers? Shade? Or are we just making future compost?)

Growth Isn’t Good…

…but it’s not necessarily bad, either. It depends on the growth you want and the growth you need. If you have a fast-growing lawn already, you don’t need to make it grow taller. You just have to mow it and tend to it more often.

Likewise, you can spend all your time focusing on bringing out the flowers, but not have a healthy root system primed to survive the seasons.

Growth for growth’s sake is not a great idea. You might be over-developing a muscle or a habit that is already a strength for you, instead of shoring up a weakness.

If you have an awareness that Growing Up, Growing Out and Growing Deep are different exercises, you’re less likely to ignore one of them.

Download audio file (o125.mp3)

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Ain’t technology grand?

It’s great that I can tap into networks of really smart people with relevant knowledge and skills.

I can’t tell you how awesome it is that other professions have embraced the ability to break the barriers of time and space to collaborate.

It can’t help but make us smarter, or at least more confident we can access faster answers with a greater degree of success.

We’re not talking Wikipedia here, we’re talking about top experts bouncing ideas off each other.

It’s exciting, but after seeing a couple of recent articles, I’m both scared and relieved.

The Doctor Is (Linked) In

Social Media goes beyond Twitface and TubeBook and Flicklicious. There are social networks for just about anything, including one that had skimmed under my radar. Sermo is a social network for doctors, and boasts more than 100,000 members. You can’t just join, you have to be a licensed physician, and you use your unique license ID for signing up.

Now, instead of having to put up with Dr. House’s crap (or the local hospital equivalent,) doctors with difficult challenges and atypical cases can bounce ideas off each other in near real-time. House can outsmart a room full of doctors, but not a chat-room full of them.

However, there are concerns that 100,000 is too many for there to be certainty of trust. Dr. Jeffery Parks hit the danger perfectly late last month at MedCityNews:

“What if someone obtained access to Sermo for nefarious purposes? Perhaps a physician-turned-hospital administrator who went looking for dirt on a trouble-making internist. Or a malpractice attorney who used his brother-in-law’s log-on ID to troll for cases.”

The truth is that the wider your circle of trust, the flimsier the membrane that holds it together. The fictional doctors at Princeton-Plainsboro might really want to stick it to Dr. House one day, but ultimately they share a joint paycheck that holds them back from the brink of stupidity. Anonymous strangers from Parts Unknown don’t have the natural check-and-balance. And here, we’re not talking about just the personal spats and stats of doctors. It’s the confidentiality of your medical records, and his VD test, and her cancer screening, and whatever else is being shared.

When one person breaks the trust of the group, it chills the exchange, eventually rendering the network less potentially useful.

And it’s not just anonymity that breeds the potential for breaking trust.

First Amendment Versus Fourth Estate

Dr. Parks is rightfully concerned Sermo might one day have a “Journolist moment.” In the Journolist case, hundreds of reporters and editors who cover Washington politics used a private mail list to let off steam. They felt protected in that walled garden, and could speak freely about their personal views and biases.

Until someone broke the Circle of Trust.

That someone leaked volumes of emails and messages from the inside, and there are some real doozies. Reporters who carefully hid their biases from readers and viewers are now full-on exposed, by name. No doubt some of those passages are contextually manipulated to make them look bad, but many of them can’t look good in the name of objectivity no matter which angle you stream the light.

Let’s just say that depending on your predilection, it’s either fodder for the far right to grumble about bias, or it’s downright proof of media bias.

Others have written about the group-think in action, or the implications of these revelations (if indeed they represent more than tribal posturing.)

One thing that was missed, buried in the comments, is something far more damaging than bias.

Ignorance of Ignorance

The Daily Caller has been running with Journolist archives for a while now, and they almost have become old news. But a passage about the fear and loathing of Fox News made me turn my head:

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

And so a debate ensued. Time’s [Michael] Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Where to begin?

The Federal Communications Commission has authority over broadcast stations, which means those using the sacred and scarce over-the-air spectrum. Local stations carry licenses granted by the FCC, and those licenses are reviewed periodically. The FCC does not have the authority to touch cable, and really doesn’t even have a mandate to direct the activities of television networks like CBS and NBC. (In the case of the infamous Janet Jackson Super Bowl Nipple-Gate, the FCC didn’t fine the network – it merely fined the 20 CBS affiliates that happened to be owned by the Viacom.)

I’m somewhat nonplussed that neither Zasloff (the law professor) nor Scherer (the journalist) knew those boundaries.

I’m somewhat disheartened that of the hundreds of journalists who might have read that exchange, not a one of them understood the FCC’s limitations, or had the temerity to bring it up.

What Fosters Trust Also Feeds Inbred Thought

The closed ecosystem makes us feel safe to express the hopes and wishes we’re all entitled to. But it also breeds insular thinking, a group-think that becomes a litmus test for belonging above other potential qualifications. (see: East Anglia emails, Climategate.)

By the same token, a completely open ecosystem invites change and new ideas, but at the expense of the expedience that allows experts to share the confidential and proprietary in a safe environment.

Our understanding of the balance between Open and Closed strikes at the very heart of the effectiveness of these networks, whether they are answer boards, discussion forums, or our Facebook profiles. Yes, we’re social beings, but too many communities ignore the flaws of human nature. There’s a lingering hope that these enlightened technologies will free us from our base desires, our jealousies and our insecurities. But that hope is misplaced. I’m banking those same impurities of human nature may be the firewall that prevents us from sharing too much, and becoming victims of the inevitable breach of trust.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Heat Signs Zydrunas Ilgauskas

MIAMI, July 17- The Miami HEAT announced today that they have signed free agent center Zydrunas Ilgauskas. Per club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.

During the 2009-10 season, Ilgauskas averaged 7.4 points, 5.4 rebounds and 20.9 minutes, while shooting 44.3 percent from the field in 64 games (six starts). He recorded double-figure points on 19 occassions and four double-digit rebound games.

Curiously enough, Ilgauskas was a teammate of Lebron’s in Cleveland.

Lebron James was once known as one of the best basketball players never to win a championship, prior to his entrance in the public consciousness as one of the most egocentric athletes in history. He goes to Miami as a free agent, along with other highly-sought free agents Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. The three are often thought of as cooking this together, but you get the feeling that Ilgauskas is coming along because a title isn’t enough for Lebron James; he wants a legacy as a team-builder.

Body Mind and Soul

There’s a story that appears on the cover of my first-edition hardbound copy of Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor. It’s lightly glossed, and hard to read in the picture:

A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, What are you doing? and the man answered, I am laying bricks. He asked the second, What are you doing? and the man answered I am building a wall. He walked up to the third man, who was humming a tune as he worked and asked, What are you doing? and the man stood up and smiled and said, I am building a cathedral.

Simmons’ use of the story is meant to convey the importance of one’s attitude in determining happiness, and how our satisfaction with various tasks are influenced by the part we think we’re playing in a bigger picture. But that’s not the issue with Lebron and the Miami Heat.

Unrealistic Expectations

A bricklayer is not an architect. That’s not to say a person can’t be both, but the jobs are quite different. A bricklayer has an important job, which can get lost in the repetitive task at hand. Going into a mind-numbing trance makes for an easy flow, but if you lose sight on the wall you’re building, you can lay a row of bricks that extends too far.

And that’s my fear – that Lebron James is trying to do something that’s not necessarily within his zone of competence.

• It’s one thing to play the game.
• It’s another thing to coach the players.
• It’s yet another thing to manage the team, assembling players and coaches that mesh.

On the whole, the business world recognizes this, and so does the sports world. Yes, there are excellent managers who worked their way through the trenches, but they are individuals who happened to have separate skill sets. Most of them were not the best salesman on the staff before their promotion to sales manager.

And this is the very reason Social Media is having difficulty in getting adopted in many industries.

Take a look at many of the job listings floating around for Social Media Directors. Some of them read like they were written by Human Resources Aliens from some alternate dimension. Where exactly will you find someone with both five years experience in Social Media and eight years experience with management and budgets? If you had that kind of budget experience, you likely weren’t playing around with Twitter and RSS feeds. They want Architects who have experience laying bricks.

Immaturity Breeds Distrust

It’s no real secret that corporate cultures are suspicious of things with silly names like Twitter and Yammer, or any of the services with dropped vowels, unexpected capitalization or misspelled words in the title.

There’s even more room to be suspicious of turning over authority and accounts to interns who have “an account with the Facebook.” The inversion of the knowledge base has turned stomachs in C-Suites, where top executives find they want Big Picture summaries from people who have no experience in Big Picture culture and can’t speak Big Picture language.

The successful organizations are the ones that recognize communication as communication, no matter the format. They apply the same sort of strategic thinking to new tools as they do the old ones. Smart companies will integrate rather than eliminate. But it won’t be an easy transition, because those who champion social media in their organizations don’t often have the resume (or the personal relationships to navigate their particular culture.)

There are more than enough people who know how to manage other people. There are plenty of people who know how to manage communications. There are hordes of people who know about successfully implementing social media. But they aren’t the same people, not yet.

Which brings us back to Lebron. He’s the “rock star,” the practitioner who can bring the house down at any moment. He’s leveraged that ability to create a unique situation, where he can fail on multiple levels.

• Will his play suffer if he spends too much energy soothing the egos he’s assembled?
• Will his desire to excel on the court bruise those same egos?
• If Ilgauskas shoots bricks instead of laying them, will Lebron’s Architectural legacy diminish?

Would any sane business put the top salesman in charge of the company’s direction on a whim? No. And that’s why Social Media is still scary to the Architects at the top.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a common enough phrase, and it describes the manner in which people or organizations jump before knowing where they will land. It describes those instances where there was no strategy or thought into a goal before one starts an activity.

We make fun of those people, and the silly mistakes they make. But consider this story:

The Young Archer

A young archer spent years honing his skills, with the hopes of earning a medal at the annual festival in the countryside. His every spare moment went into practice, and the collection of the finest wood and materials for his bow, and even into the study and forecasting of the wind.

Finally, he was ready to make the journey to the faraway competition.

When we was three days out, he began to see signs that he was on the right road. Occasionally, he’d find a target painted on a tree, with an arrow protruding from the middle. Seeing the opportunity to keep his skills fresh, he fired a few shots into the center of those targets and moved along.

Two days away, he started seeing more of the trees with the arrows sticking out of the bulls eyes. “My competitors appear to be skilled and consistent. I hope to be worthy,” he muttered to himself. The young archer took a few more practice shots and continued his long ride.

The next day, and one day before his arrival for the contest, he came upon a farmhouse in a meadow. The farmhouse was covered in targets, as was the neighboring barn. Every target was decorated with a single arrow sticking out of the middle. Knowing that he would have no chance against such an opponent, he swallowed his pride and decided to learn what he could from this master.

He knocked on the door, and a much older man answered. “Can you please show me how you are able to perform such feats?” the young man asked. “Sure,” replied the old farmer. Then the old man picked up a wretched old bow, and a single arrow that could not in any way be considered straight. “Follow me.”

The old man walked into the clearing, and faced the side of the barn. The young archer was taking mental notes, wanting to see how the old man tempered his breathing and his tremors; if there was some technique to better gauge the distance. The young man was about to ask a question about hesitation and focus when the old farmer quickly pulled back the string and fired the arrow straight into the broad side of the barn.

He then walked to the wall, reached through a window to grab a small can of paint, and proceeded to draw circles around the arrow on the wall.

The False Mandate

Yes, we make fun of those who shoot first and ask questions later (or those who jump into a new technology or tactic without a plan for success.) But how often do we allow the Perfect to be the enemy of the Good Enough?

I talked with a group yesterday about presentation skills, and there was a question about the best way to order your points during a talk.

The truth is, when it comes to persuasion and communication, there are often thousands of possible answers, and most of them are right! Do we tell is chronologically, or in order of importance? Save the most important point for the end, or get it out front? How many slides are too many, or too little?

You can get bogged down in the ten thousand things, and miss the obvious: that your audience isn’t interested in the backstory. They only see the result. Pick the path that suits you, then make sure that everything else leading that way is painted to match.

It takes tremendous skill to hit a target that someone else chooses.

Don’t discount the skill involved in selecting a target for yourself, and committing to it.

©2012 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.