Archive for June 1st, 2001

The Peanut Gallery Strikes Back

Posted June 1, 2001 By Pattie Gillett

In case you haven’t noticed, the “c” word is pretty big around here. No, not “cheesesteak,” though that may run a close second. I’m talking about “community.” In fact, in some from or another, we at TINN are always talking about community. It’s why we’re here; it’s why this site exists. There are literally thousands of small online communities in existence consisting of groups of people bound together by commonalties others would find strange. In studying even one of these groups, you might be surprised to find how they define “community.” I was the first time I entered a fan fiction community.

To use the widely accepted definition, fan fiction is the reworking of the original text of a motion picture, television program, novel, or series of novels to better serve the needs or interests of a smaller community. That definition is not mine; it comes from researcher Henry Jenkins who literally tagged along with Star Trek fans for years analyzing their interactions at conventions, meetings, etc. Jenkins also came up with some general fan fiction categories, which do a great job of furthering explain what fic writers do with their source material. Here, briefly are the basics: Read the remainder of this entry »

You Are Not Helping, Boss

Posted June 1, 2001 By Pattie Gillett

Even those of us with less than 10 years working experience can recognize bad management skills when they see them. Between my jobs in college, my semester internships and my post-college employment roller coaster rides, I could probably pick poor management skills out of a line-up at three in the morning. So in honor of the first month in my MBA program and just because I feel like it, I’m writing an open letter to my bosses letting them know that the dumb things they did have not gone unnoticed. My collection of past and present supervisors will be consolidated under one false name for space and privacy purposes. (Not that I really need to worry that any of them are wasting time reading this. Most of them have a very busy puppy-kicking schedule to keep.)

TO: Maurice Ron
FROM: Me
RE: The Sense God Gave You, Lack Thereof

Good advice is something one seldom asks for but always needs. Please take my advice for what it is worth and remember that constructive criticism builds a better you.

  • The management course you took that advised keeping ill-informed, angry, inept workers on your front lines (e.g. in customer service, on your sales force) was not seeing the whole picture. I would seriously consider rethinking this tactic.
  • Do not implement an expensive and complicated software system before at least two people in your company understand it. Also, for the love of all that is good and decent, don’t take the older system off-line before you have a plan in place to fix the new one when (and I do mean when) it breaks.
  • Please do not change the security code on the restrooms without telling anyone. It’s really not funny after the first two times.
  • Proving Darwin’s survival theory with free pizza is not everyone’s idea of a good team building strategy. We truly do not like having to outwit, outsmart, or outplay our colleagues for food. In short, when ordering lunch for the office, do be sure to order enough for everyone.
  • Do not refer to female employees over the age of 18 as “your girls” no matter how much you may think you look like Cary Grant.
  • If you monitor your employees’ Internet use, do so wisely. The occasional Steven Wright-isms email is not cause for a memo. On the other hand, a 75% increase in traffic to Monster.com may be worth looking into.
  • For the last time, learn the difference between “Reply” and “Reply to All.” It’s much easier than trying to explain how you meant “damn pain in the ass” in a good way. The corollary to this advice is to remember to hang up the phone completely before calling the person you were talking to a bastard.
  • Do not assume that one over-performing department can make up for five under-performing departments. No, not even if they work Saturdays.
  • The karaoke machine you rented for the office Christmas party did not make up for the lack of bonuses that year. It really didn’t.
  • Your “whoever buys my lunch gets to be favorite employee of the day” routine wears thin really fast.
  • Publicly berating people for their work performance does not make them better workers, it just makes them pissed at you and they often quit. You end up with empty positions and unfinished work. So when you think about it, your legendary tirades serve only as complete wastes of time.

Sincerely,

Your employee

Author’s Note: While I have exaggerated a bit for comic effect, most of the situations on which these comments based actually happened. I’ll be more than happy to explain on the boards if you’re really interested. I’d much rather read your additions to this list, though.

Costs of Conscience

Posted June 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

My first attempt at an honest-to-God full time job after I graduated from college was at a public relations firm in Manhattan. It was my job to coordinate a lot of the logistics of our efforts to get our clients better press, and I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that I was absolutely terrible at my job. A large part of the job was keeping track of various pieces of paper, and one look at my office will tell you what a poor match that was. My real downfall, however, was that I had to photocopy a lot of articles from magazines and newspapers and whatnot. A smart person would have made the photocopies quickly and then gotten back to keeping track of the pieces of paper. Not me. I stopped to read all of the darned things. I was single-handedly responsible for at least a tenth of a point reduction in the national productivity statistics. But while my three months in PR are not exactly the high point of my resume, all that reading did have a payoff. Since the main client I was responsible to was a maker of personal-finance software, a lot of the stuff I read taught me things about the financial world that I probably never would have had a clue about otherwise.

So after I left, I read books and subscribed to financial magazines. I added stock discussion boards to my bookmark list, and started to at least think about retirement planning, how I could achieve at least some level of financial security, and all the other little things that you need to know in order to be a functional adult in the American economy but that the school system never seems to get across. Part of it was natural curiosity, part of it was fascination with the psychology of the decisions that millions of investors around the world make every day, and of course part of it was a very practical desire to “do well.” But that desire raised another question. As you can probably tell from some of my other writings, I am critical of the decisions that many wealthy individuals and corporations make in order to protect and increase that wealth, because I think those decisions are often unfair and inflect great harm on a large number of people. How, in good conscience, could I then try to profit from those decisions through investments?

After all, the Standard & Poor 500 Index, which is the basis for at least a part of the stock components of many 401(k) and retirement plans, includes any number of tobacco and oil companies, companies with poor environmental or labor records, and so on. Right now there any number of mutual fund managers plowing into energy stocks, inspired by the power shortfall in California and the Bush Administration’s “Conservation? How’s that spelled again?” energy policy. There are a number of mutual fund companies that have tried to screen out the worst of these offenders. The Domini Social Equity Fund, for example, is based on the Domini 400 Social Index, a collection of companies that excludes tobacco and oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and other corporations judged to have poor records. The Fund has done pretty well; until technology stocks took a nose dive in 2000 , it matched or exceeded the performance of the S&P 500. And it’s not the only “socially responsible” fund; leading fund company Vanguard has one that tracks the Calvert Group‘s own social index, and there are plenty of others out there. But even these socially conscious funds may not give you a clear conscience. If Kathie Lee Gifford’s sweatshop activities with Wal-Mart gave you pause, Domini would have been a bad place for your money until very recently — Wal-Mart was part of the Domini 400 until February of this year. If you think Microsoft has behaved unethically, stay away from Domini and Calvert — it’s a principal holding. You can try to pick individual companies that you think behave well — but you can never be sure that somewhere along the line, they’re not outsourcing their manufacturing to some small country with absurdly cheap labor.

I’m not sure how proud I am of the way I resolved this potential crisis of conscience. But I realized that there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy I have to accept in myself. I am not a wealthy person by any stretch, but I can afford to buy steaks and wasteful prepackaged foods. I run my air conditioner almost full time during the summer months. I sit in an office surrounded by CD players, PCs, DVDs, full bookcases, dozens of plastic toys and action figures, comic books and other knickknacks. I’m afraid to even look at the label of most of my clothes. So my hands are far from spotless; I’m no Mother Theresa. I like to say I do what I can, but really, I do what I’m comfortable with, and if that’s more than many people who are better off than me are comfortable with, does that even reach the level of damning with faint praise? But my consumeristic choices do keep other people employed, even if it’s not as many as I’d like, and I like to think I’m using the technology and tools at my disposal to improve the situation. If the articles I’ve written about education funding and taxation help spark a dialogue, and that dialogue contributes to new ways of addressing these problems, isn’t that a better result than if I just took a vow of poverty and no one ever knew why? If renting The Matrix gives me material I can use to be a more effective teacher, is my VCR a waste? The only way I can stay sane is to not let the good that I have not done blind me from seeing the good that I have done. I think the same holds true for would-be socially-conscious investors — if you somehow make money from an enterprise that you’re not one hundred percent comfortable with, that gives you a responsibility to use some of that money to benefit others, and turn a negative into a positive. I realize this principle can be taken too far, and justify doing some pretty crummy things and then trying to buy your way to redemption — but hey, I’m a pragmatist. Rough guidelines and judgment calls are my stock in trade. And in a world where nobody’s perfect, I don’t think they can be avoided.

Does Berkeley Have Bite?

Posted June 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

In our last exciting epistemological adventure, John Locke tried to split the difference between objectivity and subjectivity by claiming that objective, primary qualities of objects gave rise to our subjective perceptions or interpretations of secondary qualities in those same objects — so that, for example, the exact shape and size of the particles that make up an apple (and which are always in the apple) interact with our sense organs to make us perceive the color, taste, texture, and so on of the apple. It was a fairly decent compromise, with only one major problem: it doesn’t work. Anglican clergyman/theologian/philosopher George Berkeley wrote a number of texts in the early 1700s that aimed to silence the skeptics who challenged the authority of humanity’s knowledge (and by extension, humanity’s knowledge of God’s authority), and his route went straight through Locke’s system.

Berkeley’s problem with Locke was that in order to maintain a division between objectivity and subjectivity, Locke held onto the distinction between matter — an unthinking, unsensing “stuff” — and ideas — the stuff that goes inside our heads, including our own perceptions. But once you create the distinction, you also create a gap, and it’s that gap that skeptics usually attack. How do we know that the idea that we have in our head really matches up with the matter that’s “out there” causing the idea? (Remember the Matrix scenario.) In terms of Locke’s division into qualities, the questions can be put this way: Locke assumes that the primary qualities give rise to the secondary qualities. But the only way we can know anything about the primary qualities is through the secondary qualities! If I want to know how long something is, for example, I have to rely on my perceptions of color and shading and texture to know where the object ends and where it begins. So the whole process is reliant on what’s going on inside my mind — there’s no totally objective object “out there” in the world that I understand directly. Read the remainder of this entry »