Tyler’s Toolbox

The past three days I’ve gotten in two political arguments with folks who I perceive as creating rifts in the political process and slowing things down. The first was with Karl Rove and a Karl Rove supporter. The second was with an old classmate from film school who was protesting our treatment of George Bush and Barack Obama.

His exact words are as follows:

“When terrorists killed thousands and we fought back, you said “murderer.” When the idiot took over the banks and auto companies, wants to eliminate term limits, takes Palistine’s side, kissed our enemies’ feet, and wants to “just talk” to our long time nemesis, you still call him hero. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH OUR FREAKING COUNTRY?!?!?!“

I am really fed up with our inability to broach issues. What follows is my first attempt at a piece of writing on this issue. It was written quickly and is a quick edit of something I wrote re-actively as a response in an email, and because of this it seems rough and incomplete. I’d love your feedback and thoughts on this issue to help clarify this important issue.

Before I get too deeply into this, I want to be clear: no party gets what I’m about to say right. I’m engaging you because I hope to sway your opinion one-on-one, not because I’m claiming liberals or conservatives are any better at the course of action I’m suggesting. Our political system is very broken, and people on both sides of the aisle are responsible. I’m hoping that some of us can adopt civility and use our example to influence others, and eventually, to influence the system.

The claims that I’ve seen made from political pundits and journalists grate on me daily. Few if any of their points is intended to be a critique of a policy decision that describes why the decision was wrong, they are all one liners that offer no real analysis of any action, but serve to sound very bad and make people fearful. Here’s how a message could be packaged in a way that creates opportunity for discussion:

“Obama is pushing the agenda of meeting with Iran without preconditions. Opening lines of communication like this legitimizes a brutal regime that hates us, as the only superpower in the world our vote of legitimacy is an important one and we should be more careful about how we use it — offering to meet Iran without trying to use the value of that meeting to force them to make changes is a mistake.”

I would probably rebut that, as I believe openness offers far more power in the decentralized world that has evolved over the past two decades, but at least I can respect the viewpoint put forth — and discuss it rationally. If a pundit were to defend their viewpoint, whatever it is, with that level of detail I can rationally evaluate it and decide if it offers anything.

This is hard to do, because it makes us vulnerable. Complex, well thought out ideas that resound with many people on different levels can be retorted with pithy one-liners that inspire a frothy response from a core group. In those situations it often feels like the complex thought loses — but in reality that thought has contributed to a better conversation, better information for decision making and a move towards slowly bridging gaps and potentially widening it’s proponent’s appeal.

Complex, well-defined plans should not be the types of propositions our system punishes, and if more of us on both sides start to value discussion over rallying behind sound bites, we can marginalize those who cling to the us vs. them mentality. This can’t come from one party, it’s got to be a widespread effort.

What most pundits discuss serves one purpose: To anger people who align opposite them and rally people who align with them. Most of the folks that defend these actions and follow their lead, don’t do this purposefully, but are reacting to feeling marginalized politically. It’s an understandable emotion to be annoyed, fearful, and angry when people in power share very different goals or beliefs than you. Lashing out in that situation is common and comforting. It isn’t effective though, as it only increases the rift between the groups. Emotions have no place in politics, it is a complex world that is built upon compromises, and compromises require rational thinking.

I have faith that many of us are equipped mentally, spiritually, and physically to recognize that our initial reaction isn’t always constructive and because I believe us to be capable of that, I hope that we’ll engage in more meaningful ways.
If dividing citizens and encouraging them to fight with and ignore each other is your goal — we must marginalize you.

What do you think?

I pay attention to what smart people pay attention to.

I moderated a panel on social media yesterday for IPN, and got really deep into using facebook and twitter (especially twitter) to monetize, serve customers, learn market data, generate sales and get referrals.  We missed however one of the core uses of social media — understanding more about people’s habits, in particular about their attention profiles.

I get real-time and relevant data from following the folks that I see as leading thinkers in their field, and this is primarily how I learn about trends in my industry, or in tangential industries, that I can capitalize. By utilizing tools like delicious and twitter, I can see what smart people pay attention to.  By lowering the bar (and the risk) for them to publish information, they are more willing to share — and that’s something you can benefit from.

If you turn on the fire-hose and consume the active sharing of information from 10-20 sources, you’ll see your rate of learning jump up. If you were one of the people who weren’t on twitter at the talk, let me ask you to do the following things to test this theory.

1. Signup for an account at twitter and get an RSS reader (I suggest google reader)
2. Identify a topic you’d benefit from learning more about, like, marketing using social media.
3. Search for 3-5 experts in this field who use twitter, and follow them (for social media marketing, let’s say @jacobm @jeffwidman and @garyvee). Read every tweet. My tip is to get it sent to your phone.
4. Note if any of them have blogs, if so, subscribe to them in google reader (Jacob, Jeff, and Garyvee all do).  Also look for the more traditional leaders in this space who aren’t really using twitter yet (like Seth Godin) and subscribe to them as well.   note: do not use this opportunity to subscribe to topic-specific blogs or twitter accounts, as these can have overwhelming volume and generally just parrot back what the leaders have already known for hours/days/months. If it’s really important, one of the people you’re following will talk about it.
5. Now, identify if any of them are using Delicious to share bookmarks. If so, subscribe to an RSS feed of their posts in google reader.  Jacob does. So does Jeff.
6. Read EVERYTHING.

It shouldn’t be too much. It’s rare that individuals post more than 1-2 blog posts a day, 1-10 tweets a day, or 5-10 bookmarks a day.  If it’s impossible for you to follow along you can cut people out and remove the noisy folks.

For the advanced class, rinse and repeat the above with twitter, youtube, vimeo, tumblr, etc. Look for where people on the forefront are sharing what their attention is on and make it your priority to pay attention to that as well.

Do this for a week, and I think why you’ll see it’s one of the most powerful tools to quickly gauge what an industry is working on at that moment, and what tips can you pickup from the thinking of experts.

MIT has conducted a recent study that seems to link socializing face to face with co-workers can lead to a 30% rise in worker productivity. This inherently makes sense, and I think it’s crucial to remember that as a manager, you want people to like each other, to spend time together, in or out of the office.

However, I bet there’s an interesting sub-study here about proximity of workspaces. When working on something soloitarily, I work significantly slower in office than I do from a coffee shop or from home. In the office, I’m interrupted frequently by questions about my tasks or announcements of good news — I’m literally never able to get into a flow state.

This is not to indict my co-workers, for I’m equally guilty of laying off personal thoughts onto co-worker’s conciousness. By asking someone about a task, I’ve reminded them and can remove that worry/thought from my mind.  It’s human nature to offload these responsibilities as much as possible.

It’s clear, however, that face to face communication is best for collaborating, and that socializing around breaks in focus points on work is beneficial to overall output. So working in physical isolation makes no sense.  My solution has been to work daily from the office, but to complete some work tasks in the morning or early evening from home, therfore working potentially fewer daily hours in office.

On Saturday, I attended The Future of Asia Redpath Seminar. It was an opportunity to learn from some incredible thinkers, I couldn’t have been happier with the mental meal I gorged on.

Inspired by this guy (+ this) and a study that found doodlers actually often have better memory recall, I tried drawing the speakers while taking notes. I’ve never seriously drawn anything in my life, I actually kind of liked it, might try to get better at it.

You might enjoy my summary page which contains some interesting nuggets out of about 15 pages of notes. Here’s the event’s brochure for more data.

Redpath Seminar Note Summary