Welcome to the Daily Lark, the rants, ramblings and musings of Andy Lark – serial opinionator, mover and shaker
Press conferences are notoriously hard things to manage. I thought this was an amusing end to the President’s first press conference and the way to handle what inevitably happens at these events:
There was one last twist: Obama patiently listened to a high-decibel question after he had closed the presser by thanking the reporters for attending. Then he said it would set a bad precedent for him to answer a shouted question. Reelected presidents can do that.
Fred Hoyle’s the Black Cloud is a stunning read. Well worth the time and accolades as one of the greatest works of science fiction ever. Loved this opening to one of the latter chapters:
It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations or states. New ideas, fragile as spring flowers, easily bruised by the tread of the multitude, may yet be cherished by the solitary wanderer.
Another great new digital magazine. Well worth a look.
And if you are into philosophy and the like – this article on Alan Watts is brilliant. As the story goes:
He was, if not the earliest, then certainly the foremost translator of Eastern philosophical ideas to the West. In some ways, his interpretations were radical — for instance, he dismissed the core Zen idea of zazen(which meant spending hours seated in contemplative meditation) as unnecessary. ‘A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away,’ was his forgiving interpretation of zazen. Slightly less forgiving was his comment on Western Zen enthusiasts, whom he mocked as ‘The uptight school … who seem to believe that Zen is essentially sitting on your ass for interminable hours.’ It was a great relief to read this for someone like me, who found the idea of excessive meditation as unhealthy as the idea of excessive masturbation.
Watts also rejected the conventional ideas of reincarnation and the popular understanding of karma as a system of rewards and punishments carried out, lifetime after lifetime. It was this radical approach that made his ideas so fresh — he had no time for received wisdom, even from those who claimed to know Zen inside out.
Many Zen ideas have become debased into ‘new age’ philosophy, basely transmuted into wishful thinking, quasi-religious mumbo jumbo and the narcissistic fantasies of the ‘me generation’. But before the beatniks and the hippies got hold of it, Zen philosophy, as described by Watts, was hard-edged, practical, logical and, in some ways, oddly English in tone, as it had deep strands of scepticism and humour. (You’ll never see Christian saints laughing. But most of the great sages of Zen have smiles on their faces, as does Buddha.)
In an age obsessed with demand-centric marketing – which is all about harvesting – it’s too easy to forget or stray away from building and creating markets. This terrific quote (thanks Seth) reminded me of that:
Wenda Millard quotes a Mercedes Benz exec, “If the only time I show you a Mercedes ad is just before you’re about to buy a fancy car, I’ve lost.”
The fact is, advertising to build brand and recognition and demand is a very long-term proposition, not something you measure with clicks.
Damn right.
Paul is right – you nee to understand what kid of schedule you are on. More managers though need to get some of the Makers Schedule into their week. Too many confuse being busy with creating value or achieving progress. Thus the Managers Schedule becomes a productivity illusion.
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
