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.

It's a dog's life

It’s been a hard week, what with the focus on 9/11, the news that one in six Americans is officially below the poverty level and BofA ensuring that 30,000 more of us will be headed towards the poorhouse in the near future.

So here’s something that’s amusing, with just a frisson of horrid fascination attached to it to help you waste some time.

Personally I think that anyone who would do that to a dog ought to be reported to PETA.

Dressed for...something

Let me preface this by noting that I’m a member of several downloads—email lists for women who are focused on technology. The discussions have been wide-ranging, quite educational and often flat-out useful.

Plus, they’re usually devoid of the kind of testosterone-fueled member-measuring antics you find on co-ed lists (including academic ones; I belonged to a discussion list on the First World War and you would not believe the sort of venomous invective and condescending claptrap that flowed on that forum). Women tend to behave better, and all the groups have list-moms who cut off threads if they go off the rails.

But this is not to say that the correspondents are always, um, the clearest of communicators. For one thing, many of them are technocrats; for another—just look at the comments on any publication for examples of people who aren’t bothered by syntax, spelling or punctuation considerations.

One of the lists has had a thread running for a few days on what to wear to job interviews, with many cogent experience-based suggestions for tech, creative or corporate environments.

However, the following post just completely flummoxed me. I’ve left everything is exactly as she wrote it, including spelling and capitalization; my only edits are to X-out the gallery name/location, which might serve to identify her. BTW—she misspelled the gallery name.

“Fashion yes, the connection we have to clothing, work, fitting in -all very real. Where and why does that matter and wow, really connects old skool with the "look like me" fear of the "other' on parade.

“Style is a form of editing that characterizes the uniform construct within cultures. It is funny because it's the diversity that pumps up creative volume.  Ok that oxymoron is fun but the bigger thing here is "HOW?",

“Produced in a sweatshop, via chemically toxic, water fouling processes and subsidized transpotation that adds to atmospheric carbons and climate change?

“This should overrule any style aspect of 'what to wear.' When alert it is quite ez to slide it in and guess what, most people are liking the courage it takes to speak up.

“In fact people are signing up to participate in future events about these issues and more The show at the XXXX Gallery in XXX Center opens space for the discourse and it is so nice to know how many people are getting it.

“please come and see for yourselves!! It is a stunning, eclectic, unique, honest with enough whimsy to sweeten the facts...so sayeth the guests.”

The author describes herself on a social networking site (name in all lower-case, like you have to pay extra for caps; or perhaps she's channeling e.e. cummings) with equally pretentious buzzwords, which might explain her self-consciously edgy style. You should demonstrate that you know what the rules are before you break them. And she's not a recommendation for whatever institution(s) granted her four AA degrees and a certificate in  Communications in Business and Media.

But could someone please tell me what the hell this woman is saying?

I get the fact that she’s got some sort of installation going on at the misspelled gallery. But what is the rest of it all about?

The truth is really out there

Now, here’s a new application of technology that we all can get behind: British researchers have found a way to use hi-res video and some algorithms to come up with a lie detection system.

So far it seems to be pretty accurate, although they’ve only tested it on volunteers. They’re planning on installing it at an airport by way of field trial. But I think it's worth more than catching a few criminals or terrorists.

As soon as it’s passed the test, I say that TV networks should get it and use it on every broadcast covering a politician. Start with C-SPAN and work our way down to local-access cable. Every time one of them starts spouting a porky pie, the picture should flash and sirens should wail like someone hitting the jackpot at the slots in Vegas.

& then we move on to corporate executives. Install it in stockholder meetings and throw up the video on giant screens. 

It’s time we see incontrovertibly that these wanna-be emperors are stitch-stark naked.

This is what I call truly innovative, game-changing, paradigm-shifting technology.

Bank of Opportunity (not)

I’ve loathed Bank of America since the 70s, so I freely confess to being unsurprised over the past couple of years to find that as it grew its incompetence increased by an order of magnitude. I mean, it’s definitely got that anti-Midas-whatever-it-touches-turns-to dross thing down perfectly.

I was therefore appalled when we-the-people ended up bailing out BofA (which touts itself as the "Bank of Opportunity") to the tune of tens billions of our tax dollars. I can’t think of anyone outside of Wall Street executive offices who thought that was a good idea. The expression my grandmother would have used would have been “money for old rope.”

Even Warren Buffet swallowed a few pitchers of the too-big-to-fail Kool-Aid; a couple of weeks ago he invested $5B in the bank. That’s just good money after bad.

And; here’s how they’ve repaid us: as per the Corporate Manual for Fiscal Responsibility and Shareholder Value that’s used by every major business in every industry these days, BofA has announced it’s cutting 30,000 jobs.

None of them, of course, would be in senior management.

Personally, I consider that BofA has jumped bail. I’m ready to send the bounty hunters into the boardroom to do something about getting our money back.

However, I'm sure that BofA's 'Pub pals in Congress are going to find ways to enlighten us on how this fits into the world where weighting the scales in favor of deregulation & tax breaks for big business is the best opportunity for creating jobs.


I suppose that, in their collective view, 30,000 bank tellers out of work is better for the economy than 30,000 mortgage execs or hedge fund managers.

First responders

I live about half a block from Sunnyvale Fire Department Station #4. 

I drive by the station pretty much every day; and they seem to be called out pretty much every day, too. Their engines have powerful sirens and very loud horns, which they often have occasion to use as they traverse the intersection of Wolfe Road and El Camino Real, right next to my flat. (I'm hearing them as I write.)

In recent days, as I pass the station I've been thinking about the men and women who choose to put themselves in harm's way come day, go day, year in and year out. They turn out whether it's a kid choking on too big a bite of Snicker's, a grease fire in the kitchen of a novice cook or a blaze at a chemical factory.

Or a conflagration on the 103^rd floor of the World Trade Center.

I completely appreciate the fact that they exist and do their job no matter which pols in municipal, state or federal governments take shots at the wages, health coverage and pensions they get. They show up every time, run into buildings that everyone else is fleeing and do their damndest to save lives and property for us.

Thank you. Wherever you are, thank you.