MemoirLeaks

Okay, if this story doesn’t exemplify pure irony, I don’t know what does.

Julian Assange is whining about the publisher of his memoir publishing his, you know, memoir.

Yes, that’s right—the proprietor of WikiLeaks, who has made the publication of state secrets a moral crusade, is scuffing his feet in the dust, thrusting out his lower lip & crying foul because the publisher he contracted with to Tell His Story is, um, Telling His Story.

One might feel a little more sympathy for Assange if he’d given back his $1MM advance. Putting your money where your mouth is is generally a signifier of your genuine intent. Assange doesn’t pass that test.

Business school rules

In the latest chapter in the continuing saga of “The Value of Having MBAs Running Industry”, I give you Wednesday’s news:

The board of directors of Hewlett-Packard is weighing whether or not to fire CEO Leo Apotheker, who only took office last November after previous CEO Mark Hurd was sacked over a scandal involving fraudulent expense reports and putting his mistress on the “consulting” payroll.

The board, which has already shown a clear and consistent capacity to hire nothing but cretins (Apotheker will be the third CEO in six years to hit the road, and Hurd was preceded by Carly Fiorina), is considering Meg Whitman as a replacement. Obviously the adoration of the hobgoblin of little minds isn’t limited to little statesmen and philosophers and divines, but pervades the H-P boardroom.

(Also, the phrase “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results” comes to mind.)

HP used to be the gold standard for PC hardware, the best of the best. After Fiorina, Hurd and Apotheker they’re kind of the jest of the rest. (As we Bruins used to refer to USC.) But whatever happens, you can bet there’ll be more layoffs to demonstrate to shareholders that, by God, they’re taking action. And the board will ensure that compensation for senior management (and themselves) will continue to be “competitive”, because otherwise how could you ever attract high-quality talent out of the best business schools?

Along the same lines, Moody’s has lowered the ratings on Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citi. This is because the investment services firm believes that in the not-unlikely event that the three banks’ management will continue making boneheaded decisions, the federal government will not try to bail them out again.

(I wonder if the banks are going to try to get back all those campaign donations they made to our elected officials?)

So it’ll be more of a challenge for executives at those institutions to collect their usual bonuses if we-the-people aren’t propping up their financial infrastructure.

The good news, though, is that they could toss their hats into the ring for running H-P.

Friendly skies, ja

I’m not sure why the Lutherans are so easy to poke fun at. Garrison Keillor has been doing it for almost 40 years, and you don’t have to be Norwegian, Minnesotan or Lutheran to get a kick out of them.

Perhaps it’s because Lutheran stories are almost invariably genial and gentle.

(Which must make that stern old reformer spinning in his Wittenberg grave like a dreydel on the fifth night of Hanukkah.)

However that may be, here’s an audio clip from Lutheran Air Lines.

I’m just hoping that none of the passengers in the hot dish rows bring lutefisk. That would probably spark a CS gas-like reaction in the main cabin & cause the oxygen masks to drop down.

Besides, I’m not sure you could get it past the TSA screeners.

Recruiters 22

I interviewed on Friday for a product marketing job. I hadn’t been wild about it—it’s a technology I didn’t find particularly exciting, in an Israeli-run company in Foster City.

You might think that you can’t be sniffing at boring products these days, but if I’m going to market them, I have to find something about them that’s interesting. I've never learned that all-important skill of faking sincerity.

Moreover, while I completely admire what the Israelis have done carving out a thriving nation in an inhospitable land surrounded by people who want to drive them into the sea, I’ve found that their management style is…abrasive. (The one may be connected with the other.) 

And, finally, Foster City is about 23 miles up Highway 101, which the recruiter who connected me with the opening referred to as “an ugly commute”.

That’s an understatement.

When I got to the actual interview I learned that the solution is actually a lot more fascinating than I'd understood, and I really liked the hiring manager a lot. But, as it happens, the number one item on her “must-have” list is deep experience marketing into corporate IT departments, and I’ve never done that. It’s not that I couldn’t learn it pretty quickly, it’s that she needs someone who already knows that segment and can lock onto them like a lamprey.

So I thought about it on the crawl home on Friday, all day Saturday and most of Sunday, as I was trying to compose my thank-you note. It turns out it’s a lot harder to write a thanks-but-no-thanks email than a thanks-and-will-you-give-me-the-job email.

I’m hoping I don’t have to gain a lot of experience in this line.

Cat-egorical amusement

God bless the Internet—we finally have hard proof that cats of all sizes can be cuckoo for catnip. Bookmark the link, because if you’re having a lousy day, this will make you feel much better.