Archive for the ‘photography’ Category
Monday: Pitch Forward
That’s the point of Monday, isn’t it?
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Loose Lips Link Scripts
Open(ish) access for tight-lipped companies
Technical people can learn something from advertising people.
My creative director friend presented advertising concepts by first showing how his agency team came up with the idea. His presentations took a bit more time, but along the way he restated the problem, showed visuals of how competitors attempted to solve the problem and then revealed stumps of ideas that never really worked. Then he got to the solutions he hoped the client would pay for.
My friend’s process placed his solution in a context that helped those around the conference table understand why the solution made sense. As he spun out his process, he verbally brought these people with him so they were nodding “Yes” long before they signed off on the solution.
The boardwalk protects fragile land while providing access.
Many of my clients guard their proprietary information with fierce protections. And rightly so: their processes keep things running and bring in the coin that satisfies employees, stakeholders and shareholders. But in a search and share economy where like-minded people find each other more and more often, is a firewall surrounding all information really the best way forward?
The right information presented at the right time (that is, just when someone needs it, which typically coincides with a search for that information) affects buying decisions and brand loyalty. Interestingly, your technical people are right now busy working through the context that, if properly presented, would draw others to your product.
People are searching for your information.
If only they could find you.
My more innovative clients are finding ways to help their problem-definers and solution-makers talk more publicly. And as these discussions move outside the corporate walls, they best ones are finding ways to combat the PR department temptation to suck meaning from the words. Because sharing useful information happens person-to-person. And useful information will always have something of an unfiltered quality to it.
How is your organization preparing to share details with those who can help you move forward?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Question Authority: “I wonder if that’s true.”
Is suspension of belief the same as active doubt?
Strangers, colleagues, friends and family are adept at sounding like they know what they are talking about. It’s a piece of the human condition in our U.S. of A. to come across with confidence (even better—hubris—if you can manage it). Use a certain tone of voice, jam words together quickly, toss in a few technical terms, keep your head steady and hold someone’s gaze, and—presto!—you’re an expert.
And your word matters.
Back in college studying philosophy I might have been an irritating presence with friends because the most common, most innocuous comments could elicit questions. Over time I learned to hold those questions to myself and mull things over in a less public way. But whenever I find myself in the presence of people who wrap themselves with authority, those questions pop out.
I’m attracted to Robert Sokolowski’s take on phenomenology. In particular, this notion of bracketing our natural thoughts and suspending a belief to ask about it and examine the pieces and parts and moments and manifolds of that belief. It’s a great thing to do in conversation, and many generous-minded thinkers and experts will walk that direction with me. But those intent on cloaking themselves with authority—those using bits of knowledge as rhetorical tools to one-up their conversation partners—see ordinary questions that come from bracketing as weapons of aggression.
And in truth, sometimes they are. To respond to the expert with “I wonder if that is true” is to question authority, to question context, to question orthodoxy. It also brings common relationships into question. Can we be friends if you question this basic statement?
And yet the most marvelous thoughts follow those ordinary questions. Thoughts that propel forward with much deeper motivation and insight.
Friends who allow you to ask very basic questions are a gift to be cherished.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How To Rip The Top Off Your Club
Work or church or bowling: It’s easy to mistake why we’re here
First a quiz:
- My company exists to give me a job. True or False?
- My church exists so I can feel better about myself once a week. True or False?
- I’m part of a bowling league so I can practice bowling and maybe get better. True or False?
Lately I find myself using “club” to describe those organizations that have turned so inward they have forgotten their purpose. Sometimes clients forget they got into the business to help customers live better lives. Sometimes they spend their days fixated on managing up. Sometimes pastors think all these people show up to take direction, fill the offering plates and carry out the pastoral vision. Sometimes parishioners show up thinking this hour will medicate me—I’ll be inoculated from the mundane horror of daily life for about a week.
Of course, none of this we say out loud. We also try not to say these things to ourselves. But our attitude gives us away.
When I teach college writing classes and we talk about finding jobs, we spend a lot of time talking about how work is thing we do together for others. Work is not a thing set up for the sole purpose of getting money. If you think the former (work is about helping others) you’ll have an enduring, meaning-making attitude that will help you accomplish stuff in the real world. If you think the latter (work is for me to get money/fame/prestige), you will never be satisfied. Might as well trade derivatives on Wall Street.
It is true that we each stand at the center of our world. Philosopher Robert Sokolowski calls that stance our “transcendent ego.” And that’s just how we experience all there is to experience in the world. But it takes a maturing person to step away from the giddy, teen-age fiction that all of everything revolves around me for real.
Is it time to call your club back to the central purpose—the purpose that people signed up for in the beginning—making a difference in the world? If it is, you’ll likely have uncomfortable conversations with your friends in the club. You may even cause current programs to jump the tracks. But that’s ok: that’s what happens when we refocus on the bigger purposes of why we are here.
That is a work that helps all of us in the club.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Back Off Howdy.
Some toys are too friendly.
Toys you hoped to forget, now showing at the Minnesota Historical Society.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Lack of Imagination and the Middle Mind
Curmudgeon Curtis White May Be Right About ‘Merica
Two friends sat with another friend in a hospital room.
With their friend plugged into monitors and IVs, with frequent interruptions by staff and generally surrounded by unyielding clinical protocols—the best conversation these two friends could muster was…silence.
What to say with someone so needy and so plugged in? How to name the thing their friend was experiencing? Could they talk about his condition and/or prognosis, or was it better to talk about something different entirely?
One friend, the artist Nicolas Africano,
pointed to a length of clear plastic tubing suspended above us, “That amber light is beautiful.”
The other friend, Curtis White responded:
And there in fact was a tiny amber light in the middle of the tubing, a little light I hadn’t noticed at all. It was bright like an isolated star. It triangulated us. Suddenly, the situation changed for me into something completely other than it had been the moment before. We’d been translated. Reordered. Nicholas’s comment reconstellated us. I had a powerful feeling that everything has just been changed utterly and made—what other word was there for it?—beautiful. I smiled, suddenly happy. I looked at Nicholas in awe. And I thought: “You can do that?!”
This is the framing story for Curtis White’s The Middle Mind (NY: HarperCollins, 2003), which is not an easy book.
It was hard for me to stick with it right up until it became hard for me to put down. White comes across as an elitist, academic know-it-all who seems to enjoy pointing out the dark side of everything I hold dear (Terry Gross a proprietor of the middle mind? Really?). Although he insists he is not interested in “high/low culture distinction,” it wasn’t until my second time through the book that I began to understand how his framing story (the amber light in the hospital tubing) is a call to use imagination to see things differently.
White’s “middle mind” is a form of management, a strategy used by leaders in entertainment, academic orthodoxy and political ideology that prevents people from finding their own way. The middle mind management strategy offers up a set of topics that look and smell like genuine thinking, but in fact, are designed to keep an audience from stepping outside the boundaries. Perhaps White’s notion of the middle mind is something like how we get our kids to go to sleep at night: “Would you like to brush your teeth before or after you put on your pajamas?” (See what I did there? Putting on pajamas and going to bed was not one of the choices. Sneaky.)
White indicts everyone from journalists to entertainment to business. He castigates the American public for lack of imagination to see outside the news cycles and ridiculous sound bites and a two-party political system. The book is more than ten years old, so was written back when the drums of war we being beaten with particular urgency (then again, when is that not happening?). Ten years on, there are legion more opportunities for middle mind observations. Facebook and “following” and Twitter and, our celebrity worship—there is no end of examples.
There is much to disagree with in Mr. White’s book (for instance, his sweeping dismissal of faith). But his underlying notion that we need to get back to the work of using our imagination to interact with our institutions and work and leisure is a valid call to action and worth considering.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
No, Really: What does a Philosopher do?
When Adjuncts Escape
Helen De Cruz has done a fascinating and very readable series of blog posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) tracking the migration of philosophical thinking from academia into the rest of life. As low-paid, temporary workers (that is, “contingent faculty” or “adjuncts”) take over more and more university teaching duties (50% of all faculty hold part-time appointments); smart, degreed people are also starting to find their way out of this system that rewards increasingly narrowed focus with low pay and a kick in the butt at the end of the semester.
Ms. De Cruz has a number of excellent interactions with her sample of former academics (at least one of whom left a tenured position!). I love that Ms. De Cruz named transferable skills. What would a philosophy Ph.D. bring to a start-up? Or a tech position? The answers she arrives at may surprise you.
Why the Nichols Station Apartments look different.
I’ve always felt we carry our interests and passions and skills with us, from this class to that job to this project to that collaboration. And thus we form a life of work. Possibly we produce a body of work. We once called this a “career,” but that word has overtones of climbing some institutional ladder. I think we’re starting to see more willingness to make your own way—much like Seth Godin described his 30 years of projects.
The notion of “career” is very much in flux.
And that is a good thing.
Of particular interest to me was the discussion Ms. De Cruz had with Eric Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan found his way out of studying phenomenology (and philosophy of language with advisor John Searle!) at Columbia and UC Berkeley to writing television comedy (Letterman, Flight of the Conchords, and Big Bang Theory, among others). If you’ve watched any of these, it’s likely you’ve witnessed some of the things a philosophical bent does out loud: ask obvious questions and produce not-so-obvious answers. And that’s when the funny starts. It’s this hidden machinery that will drive the really interesting stuff in a number of industries.
Our colleges and universities are beginning to do an excellent job dispersing talent. That thoughtful diaspora will only grow as time pitches forward.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
“Good to Know” and a Failure to Communicate (DGtC#23)
I’ve said too much already.
If you hear this, you’ve said too much. You’ve said more than someone wanted to hear. “Good to know” is a polite way for your listener to indicate, “Please. Shut it.”
Why do we say too much?
Maybe we are excited about a topic. People will often have mercy with this motive. Sometimes the excitement rubs off. Our favorite professors and speakers demonstrated their enthusiasm for a topic by going on. And on.
Maybe it is a nervous tic that flows from fear of awkward silence.
Maybe we are hiding our tracks, like the alcoholic filling up verbal space to avoid the obvious question. Maybe our rush of words is like throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, to throw our interrogators off our track.
Maybe we’re signaling dominance. Stringing together buzzwords at a rapid pace is a time-honored tactic in corporate meetings where you have no clue how to respond. The tactic usually ends in promotion because higher-ups read “kindred spirit” in your fast mumbling. Maybe our club or church or group listens for key words to show who is in and who is out, so our rush of words is a frantic attempt to show we are in.
“Good to know” is a proper, dismissive response to much of the advertising done to us: superfluous, out of step with regular life and an obvious pitch for our pocketbook.
But when we hear “Good to know,” it may be worth stepping back and getting momentarily meta, and thinking, “Oops. I might have misjudged this person’s interest. How can I get back to connection?”
Connection is the place to be. Connection gets along well with enthusiasm and does not mind probing into track-hiding. But connection does not abide dominance.
See also: How be a verbal philanthropist (#14)
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 